Somewhere out there is a church-burning death-metal act called The Pitchforking Indie Jazzbeards who really need to arrange a name-swap with Vancouver’s Destroyer as soon as possible. Having a moniker that suggests the sort of band you’d catch sharing a stage at Bloodstock with Pancreas Exploder must have played its part in keeping Dan Bejar’s experimental art rockers in the leftfield hinterland for 20 years, one of the All Tomorrow’s Parties set’s best kept secrets.
An injustice, as their albums are intriguingly varied: stylistically, Bejar likes to “start from scratch every time”. Their recent 10th album, Poison Season, has a baroque cabaret-jazz feel, and tonight they embellish tracks such as Forces from Above and Bangkok with what we’ll call – considering their homeland’s penchant for an ugly/beautiful post-rock cacophony that sounds like mountains cracking, clouds on fire and Uranus imploding – the Canadian crescendo. Song after song, Bejar whispers enigmatic poetry in a husky vaudevillian croak beneath a swelling, atonal miasma of trumpet, sax, guitar and flute. The result often resembles an asthmatic male Edith Piaf fronting a jazz band from the Ghost Dimension. And it’s frequently mesmerising.
Like a master sculptor of nitrous oxide balloon animals, Bejar bends this formula into intoxicating shapes. Some songs are demented disco: It’s Gonna Take an Airplane is an art-folk adaption of ELO’s Evil Woman, while Midnight Meet the Rain resembles Afghan Whigs, at their most 70s-detective-theme, arresting Rose Royce for chronic sax abuse. There’s a vivacious pop drive to Dream Lover and Times Square, while the fantastic Rubies is his take on Springsteen heeling his kickstand and revving his engine, bound for some blue-collar utopia. Bejar strives for high art with the operetta ballad Girl in a Sling and cult verse with Kaputt’s ode to a hedonistic modern America “chasing cocaine through the bathrooms of the world”. A better name? We’d suggest Warhol’s Beatnik Freaks.
- At Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, 1 November. Box office: 0113 275 2411. Then at Colston Hall, Bristol, 2 November. Box office: 0844 887 1500.
