TBS Recommended: Destroyer- Destroyer's Rubies

This is the first of many installments of TBS (you know you're important when you abbreviate yourself) Recommended albums. In order for an album to get an official TBS recommendation, it must be a strong contender for album of the year. This is not for flash-in-the-pan albums that you listen to religiously for a week and then forget about. This is for truly great albums that deserve the attention of not just readers of Tall Buildings Shake, but the music-buying public in general. If you take anything from this blog, may it be an appreciation for these TBS Recommended albums.

Destroyer's Rubies is the latest album from the band Destroyer, which is the brain child of Dan Bejar, who you may know from The New Pornographers. While I'm still trying to wade through Bejar's back catalog, Destroyer's Rubies seems to be the man's most mature, complete and solid effort to date. Bejar has a very distinct lyrical style and delivery. He sounds a bit like David Bowie, though a bit less theatric and even more "yelpy" in the Canadian-indie-arcade-wolf-fire-parade sense of the word. His lyrics were made for unemployed English grad students to chew on - esoteric and seemingly meaningless, yet poetic and awesome. "Dueling cyclones jackknife/ they got eyes for your wife/ and the blood that lives in her" is quite a way to start an album. But before you can begin to analyze Bejar's bizarre couplets, he hits you with one of the album's many great pop "la la la" sing-a-long choruses and all is right in the world. Destroyer's music is a brilliant mix of classic rock with indie sensibilities. Here's a couple standouts, but there's hardly a bad track on the album:

Destroyer- "Rubies"

Destroyer- "Looters' Follies"