Archive for January, 2011

Dan Bejar returns with a brilliant album drawing from the lush sounds of the early 1980s, but never forgets the importance of songwriting. The sound surrounding Bejar cast his songs in a very particular light and reinforces the feeling of the singer as persona. Bejar has always seemed to slip in and our of character and his albums all have their own unique feel-- the rootsy art-pop of Destroyer's Rubies, the MIDI experiments of Your Blues, and so on. But here everything seems even more sharply defined. Singing these songs, Bejar comes over as the wizened ex-playboy who has indulged every vice, come through the other side, and now looks on amused.

On their second full-length outing, the young Chicago band has delivered on their early promise, with a richer sound and a better batch of songs. Their noisy full-length debut was recorded while they were still in high school, but the remarkable hooks buried therein were clear enough to land them on the increasingly stacked Fat Possum roster. And suddenly, they had a studio budget the likes of which they definitely hadn't enjoyed before. Though the leap is audibly huge, Dye It Blonde's many successes aren't wholly the result of its gilded production values and ambition. This band was able to furnish first-class melodies from the beginning. Now they've grown along with their resources.