All You’ve Got Is Style

Destroyer “Poor in Love”

She took me aside and said

“Look, I don’t do this every day,

you’ve got style…

All you’ve got is style,

I can see it from a mile away

There are probably a thousand unnameable emotions and anxieties that cluster up in the ten second pause between “you’ve got style” and “all you’ve got is style.” You seem to pass through the feelings in slow motion, slower at least than it would take for someone to actually say it. It’s a split second rendered in great detail before snapping back into what can be understood as “real time” within the song’s loose narrative. The songs takes about a minute to recover from that blow, but once the shock waves dissipate, the groove kicks in and Dan Bejar’s bohemian swagger returns. It’s beautiful, really. This is a truly gorgeous and affecting piece of music, and I don’t think I have ever heard anything quite like the graceful dissatisfaction in the sound of this, though I suppose people like Stephen Malkmus and Bob Dylan have spent a lot of time in this zone over the course of their careers.

None of this is exactly new for Bejar either, but there’s something magical in this song and the rest of Kaputt in comparison even to previous triumphs like Destroyer’s Rubies or “Myriad Harbour.” The album announces itself as a very special record — an instant classic! — in the way that it so perfectly conjures an immediately recognizable but totally ineffable set of feelings, images, concepts and arguments without seeming familiar. It’s so specific but it resists description. Really, a lot of why this is so moving is because it’s articulating complex thoughts and emotions that just do not make sense when you type them out.

Buy it from Amazon.