You didn’t have to attend Destroyer’s Sunday show at the Regent Theater to know that songwriter Dan Bejar and his band were going to have a hard time reproducing “Poison Season,” the band’s 10th album. Bejar’s been working for almost 20 years in a mode of rock song that pivots on the lyric, more melodic than the “speak-singing” tradition of Sprechgesang but less emotionally immediate than an unusually wordy songwriter like the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle.
Bejar claimed to be listening to lots of Frank Sinatra and Van Morrison during the writing of “Poison Season,” turning him into what he described at one point as a “confused jazz balladeer.