Poison Season

The first full-length Destroyer release since 2011's charting Kaputt -- with the Antonio Luque-penned Five Spanish Songs EP, and his bands the New Pornographers and Hello, Blue Roses' Brill Bruisers and WZO, respectively, dropping in the interim -- 2015's Poison Season marks prolific songsmith Dan Bejar's tenth LP with the project, and it's an intensely wistful, strings- and horns-washed epic exploration of New York city life. At nearly an hour in length, it feels immense, but more so from its unexpectedly cinematic stylings than from playing time -- with rotating, scene-setting arrangements (rock, jazz, chamber music) and beat-poetic narrative vignettes of a gritty reality seemingly from another time, or another mind. The string ensemble arrangements on the sparse opener, "Times Square, Poison Season I," proclaim yet another change in texture between albums for Bejar. It's a dramatically haunting, impressionistic, talky piece that could serve as an opening to an ominous musical, with