Live Review: Destroyer, Jess Ribeiro

Jess Ribeiro’s voice curls like smoke around prosaic lyrics about love and loneliness. Accompanied only by her electric guitar, her reverb-soaked songs are atmospheric and ethereal. Ribeiro has the natural kind of stage presence that’s pleasant just to bask in for a while, as songs and stories slip by easily. 

Destroyer’s Dan Bejar begins tonight’s solo set by playing a new song that’s either called 'Crimson Tide' or 'The Insane Funeral', he hasn’t decided yet. The setlist that follows draws widely from right across his 20-year career. Older songs like Foam Hands and Goddess Of Drought are well-suited to the stripped-back acoustic treatment they’re receiving tonight. Your Blood is dynamic enough to thrive in this format, too. “Here’s a song that does not want to be a folk song,” says Bejar, introducing Tinseltown Swimming In Blood, “but I’ll keep trying.” 

Bejar is not a folk singer – he’s more cryptic and esoteric than that – so it’s slightly odd hearing his songs presented as if he is. Destroyer’s music has edged further and further from folk music over the past two decades. His sound has come to be defined by synthesisers and wind instruments. Tonight’s renditions of songs like A Light Travels Down The Catwalk are missing some of the sonic variety of their recorded versions. Bejar does a decent job of approximating the shifting textures with just his idiosyncratic voice and guitar, but it’s hard to shake the sense that something – actually, a lot of things – are missing. 

Still, Bejar’s voice and lyrics are quite unique. Hearing them presented in a more traditional singer-songwriter mode highlights just how unconventional the bones of his songs are. In The River, after strumming some plaintive, romantic chords he sings, “She…” – and for a moment it sounds like the kind of song people play at weddings, but then – “... Despises the direction this city's been going in”. Bejar uses repetition more like a poet than a pop singer, repeating phrases rather than choruses. He does strange, exaggerated, full-body bows at the end of each song. 

Chinatown is a late highlight, demonstrating that plenty of Destroyer songs hold up in any context. After a brief encore, the closing Don’t Become The Thing You Hated shows the power of a simple, plainspoken phrase, particularly deployed by an artist so prone to poetics and abstraction.