Despite an overarching shagginess, this is an almost seamless artistic and conceptual exercise. Poison Season makes its predecessor appear minor by comparison, like a tuneful lark.
Poison Season employs strings, piano and horns to perfectly complement Bejar's even, offhand delivery of lines that, when stitched together, make up a droll, wondrous travelogue of storied metropolitan meccas.
No matter what the context—horn-section rave-up, string quartet, druggy miasma—he sounds completely at home. Poison Season is the sound of an artist in complete control of the strange chaos around him.
After ten albums in close to two decades, the band still sound as vital and inventive as ever, and they're operating at the top of their game on Poison Season.
Poison Season is yet another dramatic shift for an artist who can’t be simply defined by a genre or by what makes him popular and acclaimed throughout the 20 years he’s been making music as Destroyer.
On Poison Season, Bejar re-embraces street rock, and recontextualises it as well.
Poison Season sounds like a restless musical intellect stretching out with new confidence.
Overall this is a fantastic project filled with excellent performances, with really fantastic production that keeps the tracks sounding fresh and upbeat, while not over produced.
Everything that is potentially offputting – the lyrical opacity, the sonic excess, that voice – is what makes it such a striking and involving piece of work. In fact, it’s Bejar’s best.
By his usual standards, Poison Season is shockingly austere and restrained.
The result is an album that, on the one hand, feels much less focused or cohesive than Kaputt, but on the other hand comes across as all the more confident and playfully mature, precisely because it’s not trying to be.
Poison Season is another excellent Destroyer album, packed with songs that are graceful, beautiful and, yes, hummable.
Poison Season is even more sumptuously complete, sleek and highly refined, repurposing the champagne-coated synths of Kaputt with the aid of a full band to further accentuate his high-brow witticisms.
On Poison Season, Bejar’s new trappings may suggest self-sabotage, but the tremendously assured songcraft says otherwise.
The songs in Poison Season manage to have a delicate sadness to them whilst still maintaining the signature Destroyer sense of vigour.
He has never made, and will probably never make, a bad album—he's far too accomplished, intuitive, and literate for that. But on Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself.
While his new album, Poison Season, may not erase Kaputt from anyone’s memory, it is yet another engaging, tangled, beautiful environment, one that will be equally hard to forget.
That's the cloud Poison Season is under-it's not bad, and it certainly has its moments. But on the heels of Kaputt, it can be a frustrating, uneven listen.
Poison Season is a clever record, it’s big and bold but at the same time it has some offensively grandiose moments.
One of the most underrated masterpiece of him.
Highlights : Forces From Above, Bangkok, Times Square
This album is one of the more focused destroyer records in my opinion, so much so that there’s three tracks that are effectually interpolations on the same idea. All the connective tissue seldom drifts away from the vibe set out in track 1. It’s another destroyer masterpiece, and I love Dan bejar a lot. I’d say this is maybe his moodiest record.
Honestly one of my favourite records of his! I think he exhibited a more back to basic approach to the songwriting and stylistic ideas here that just lands so much better than some of his more overwrought projects down the line. Not as great as his early early stuff, but I still find myself drawn back to this one more often than not!
1 | Times Square, Poison Season I 2:33 | 89 |
2 | Dream Lover 3:48 | 93 |
3 | Forces from Above 5:51 | 88 |
4 | Hell 3:17 | 86 |
5 | The River 3:35 | 87 |
6 | Girl in a Sling 3:04 | 86 |
7 | Times Square 4:11 | 92 |
8 | Archer on the Beach 4:56 | 86 |
9 | Midnight Meet the Rain 3:24 | 90 |
10 | Solace's Bride 3:43 | 85 |
11 | Bangkok 5:14 | 93 |
12 | Sun in the Sky 5:33 | 88 |
13 | Times Square, Poison Season II 3:02 | 84 |
#7 | / | Diffuser |
#11 | / | No Ripcord |
#18 | / | Magnet |
#19 | / | The Needle Drop |
#23 | / | Pretty Much Amazing |
#24 | / | SPIN |
#25 | / | The Skinny |
#36 | / | Uncut |
#41 | / | Treble |
#43 | / | Pitchfork |