To listen to Kaputt, the ninth album New Pornographer Dan Bejar’s Destroyer project, means cozying up to the soft-rock saxophone that snakes throughout and binds songs to one another. The rubberized basslines and shimmers of guitar also crib from a musical cannon that is easily processed into Muzak, yet there’s more here than it first seems. Sneaky rhythms slide into place beneath the more overt and polished sounds while the dense vocal musings from Bejar and his co-conspirators are set out front, dangling and drawing in the focus. Yet those vocals are just as perplexing as the musical choices. Delivered with the deadpan mood of a narrator staring directly into the camera lens, Bejar spins together fragmented statements until they just barely add up to create murky tales of unreached dreams and missed goals. The air of the unnoticed beauty of decaying urbanity that pervades the vocals drags down the backing music, preventing things from sliding into blatant camp, but never quite giving in to nostalgia in either the lyrics or the music. This is no lost relic from the late 70s or early 80s, even if there are plenty of nods and winks to that era along the way. No, this unexpected direction from Destroyer works as a music out of time coming from a musical mind that wont sit still, follow expectations or even acknowledge trends. The sounds here aren’t quite what people are going out of their way to find these days, but these songs stick around for more than just a casual listen.

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