Destroyer

On this six-track EP, a handful of tunes from Destroyer's totally awesome 2004 art-synth overload Your Blues are given a rock/folk/freak facelift courtesy of last year's tourmates, Frog Eyes. Anyone who saw the Destroyer/ Frog Eyes circus is probably still grappling with the original versions of the songs on Your Blues, the ones Destroyer's Dan Bejar created in the drumless haze of MIDI technology and under the influence of John Cale and Thomas Dolby. Seeing a band try to structure those unyielding works onstage was hard to get your head around. But while that surreal melodrama might have frightened a few people away, this stumbling, crunchy, guitar-soaked album ought to win them back. Here, Bejar's undergraduate cabaret-esque lyrics fall in line with Frog Eyes' apocalyptic, insane folk (listen to "Don't Become the Thing You Hate" to hear it all jell into perfection) and it makes a sort of shambling sense that the live show never did.