Peripheral New Pornographers member Dan Bejar was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada,  in the latter half of the 20th century, but sometimes he’ll sing a line, drop a reference or use a woman’s name that sounds plucked from some other era, some exotic place far away from a North America blinking with bland neon signs and cellphone signals.

On “Trouble in Dreams,” his eighth record as Destroyer, a misleadingly nihilistic moniker for what is essentially a poet’s glam-rock band, Bejar sings: “Oh, I didn’t go out into this world to be stung by rich man’s hornets.” The gimlet-eyed line makes the wild-haired Bejar seem like a character in an Oscar Wilde play, lounging in a satin jacket, petting a white Persian, fumigating a rare French tobacco.

It’s an act, sort of. Speaking from a remote part of Alberta on tour, Bejar isn’t nearly the foppish dandy he presents on record, but he does admire and seek out a certain honeyed version of the sublime.

“I seem to be aiming for beauty these days. I’m not saying every Destroyer song is 100% beautiful all the time, but that is the kind of lyrics and images I want, that evoke some kind of emotional resonance and impact. I try to stay away from intellectual matters.”

Bejar’s songs aren’t devoid of the intellectual but they are first and foremost concerned with aesthetic pleasure. A previous album, “Destroyer’s Rubies,” is a fantastically rich opus of a record, brimming over with images such as watercolors spilling into the ocean and girls like gazelles, with tinkling pianos and sumptuous guitars and horns. For “Trouble in Dreams,” he stripped it down a bit and followed the nerve-wracking process of letting the songs shape themselves with no reference point.

“With ‘Rubies,’ I was into this certain feel of rock bands that existed in a very specific way on very specific albums with very specific people, like a Mick Ronson production. For ‘Trouble in Dreams,’ it was more like starting with a blank slate. It was more like we’ve knocked these songs about in a practice space and it’s more noisy, but still, after a handful of practices, we don’t have any clear idea what this is supposed to sound like … we kind of like playing the songs differently every time we play them. So, you don’t really know what the hell the song is supposed to be like, and it’s not like it has to sound like anything. It was a different way of working.”

What that might portend for tonight’s show at the Troubadour is anyone’s guess, but Bejar has great love for the form. “I like playing live in the same way that I like playing music in a room with people where no one’s watching … it’s a lot different from the recording process. In some ways, it’s a lot better. Playing live is kind of why you do it.”

– Margaret Wappler

Local musician Devon Williams opens; you can stream “Trouble in Dreams” here.

Photo courtesy of Merge