Say what you will about Destroyer’s 2006 triumph, Rubies, you’d be hard-pressed to call any of it “menacing.” But as the title of his forthcoming record suggests, Trouble in Dreams is a more foreboding work. “Shooting Rockets” is the album’s rotten heart, a sprawling eight-minute centerpiece akin to Of Montreal’s “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” from last year’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?. The song first appeared in a zombified form on Bejar side-project Swan Lake’s Beast Moans (2006); the new version emerges from the crypt with fresh vitality. Carried by a doom-laden pentatonic riff that hangs over the song while strings swell and piano chords plod along, it plays like Elton John -- think Live from the 9th Circle of Hell. And then there's Dan Bejar’s typically idiosyncratic lyrics: “A chorus is a thing that bears repeating,” he announces a few minutes in, at roughly the point where the song should by all rights offer one. More revealing are the lines, “It’s not that I quit / it’s not that my poems are shit / in the light of the privileges of dreams.” While far from a complete illumination of the darker territory Bejar is exploring, with Destroyer it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.

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