Although 'This Night' features a number of solidly written songs, this extremely production-heavy album emphasizes its faux-velvet-bell-bottom-wearin'-chamber-pop sound so forcefully—to the point of being tedious—that even those who acclimate will probably remain disgruntled.Merge
Drippy reverb makes a mush of overly rhapsodic instrumentation. Nearly every song is unmercifully dominated by affected vocals. Don't get me wrong—Daniel Bejar's coquettish voice is the perfect complement to his wistful, teasing lyrics. But over the course of the album, the vocals and the effects put too much emphasis on a fairly categorical sound, at the expense of the songwriting. Each on its own, the songs here might do a bit more justice to the band's less obvious talent for assembling the essential melodic and lyrical structures of each track. Consecutively, however, their continuous drone becomes irritating and awful. Obviously, some bands have successfully worked this angle to their advantage, but in the case of Destroyer, the somewhat desperately lush effects-laden backdrop is empty filler, a viscous mud one must wade through to get to the heart of each song. There is a pretty great album here, tragically smothered by its own "atmosphere."
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