With Destroyer’s 10th full-length album Poison Season, what began as a mostly solo project for Bejar — also known for his work in The New Pornographers — has expanded into a eight-piece touring act, complete with robust horns and harmonies. Shy and soft-spoken, smiling from behind dark sunglasses, Bejar led his band through an expansive, lush set of sophisticated, jazzy pop. Watch him perform “Times Square” here.

SET LIST

• “Times Square”

Watch Destroyer’s full performance on KEXP’s YouTube channel.

Copyright 2015 KEXP-FM. To see more, visit http://www.kexp.org/.

But with 2011’s Kaputt, Bejar and his poetic, perpetually unspooling lyricism found its most fertile sound bed to date. His ’70s rock fixation gave way to the glossy tones of the early 1980s, imagining a parallel world wherein T. Rex’s Marc Bolan survived into the new decade and decided to use Steely Dan‘s session men. Here, Bejar’s cantankerous, acidic lines were couched in the smoothest of jazz, the anger giving way to the melancholic, the bitter pill sipped with some cognac. And that sax! Such sounds carry over to the 10th Destroyer album, Poison Season, on which the heaving strings in “Times Square, Poison Season I” are lush enough to soundtrack a soap opera.

That saxophone bursts back into view with “Dream Lover,” as if Clarence Clemons had mistaken Bejar’s studio for Bruce Springsteen‘s. More sax skronk also appears in “Midnight Meet The Rain,” its conga-laced beat and wah-wah guitar bringing to mind a ’70s cop-show theme song. But nothing can ever be that straight-ahead for Bejar, who brings everything to a complete stop mid-song, to where a stool can be heard creaking in the room before everything revs back up to full speed.

As is often the case in Bejar’s work, he touches upon the rock music that came before him, his whispers on Poison Season bringing to mind the likes of Bryan Ferry‘s weary playboy circa Avalon, as well as Al Stewart’s gentle croon on Year Of The Cat. But Destroyer is judicious to draw from the more neglected corners of the canon, too. Certain turns of phrase bring to mind singers like Scott Walker and Harry Nilsson when they’d all but sabotaged their careers, avoiding all the concessions of pop in favor of their own muses’ peculiar paths.

There may be no more elegant moment in Bejar’s catalog than “Girl In A Sling,” which begins with electronic ambient washes that twinkle like stars. Almost a minute in, strings and woodwinds appear and overtake the song, gracefully carrying it off into dreamland. When Bejar’s voice comes back, it’s the sound of him approximating Harry Nilsson when he himself did his best approximation of Frank Sinatra‘s In The Wee Small Hours. “I’m been sifting through these remains for years / Bitter tears / Bitter pills / Oh, it sucks when there’s nothing but gold in those hills,” Bejar sings in his cracked coo, before he returns to the task of mining discarded sounds and reclaiming them.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.