"Shooting Rockets (From the Desk of Night's Ape)" is the sixth song on Destroyer’s Trouble In Dreams, and serves as a centerpiece, not only for this album (his eighth), but seemingly for Dan Bejar's entire recorded output. It is a sprawling anthem with shifting layers of guitars and synthesizers from which the rest of Trouble In Dreams spins and cycles just to the edge of chaos and back, on the strength of Bejar's singular vocals and Nicolas Bragg's churning guitar licks. "My Dear, Didn't you hear, a chorus is a thing that bears repeating?" asks Bejar, and then he repeats formulas, stratagems and realities we have come to expect from Destroyer: the name dropping of various women (historical, fictional and personal); the forays into fantastical realms; the pretensions and dreams; the failed relationships; the prophetic warnings; and the cross-referencing with prior Destroyer songs. Yet Trouble In Dreams remains a new experience, an amalgam of all previous Destroyer records that starts as a puzzle and unfolds delicately through repeated listening. Utilizing much of the same band from 2006’s Destroyer's Rubies, and recording once again with David Carswell and John Collins at JC/DC, Bejar has delivered a collection of songs that are fresh and confounding, yet vaguely familiar. Trouble In Dreams cements Destroyer as an artist as quirky and enigmatic as Sparks, as symphonic and grandiose as Scott Walker and as quixotically literary as Bob Dylan
http://2008.sxsw.com/music/showcases/band/70201.html
