Poison Season
| Poison Season | ||||
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| Studio album by Destroyer | ||||
| Released | August 28, 2015 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 52:11 | |||
| Label | ||||
| Producer | ||||
| Destroyer chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Poison Season | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | 86/100 |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| The A.V. Club | A− |
| Entertainment Weekly | A− |
| The Guardian |  |
| Mojo | |
| NME | 8/10 |
| Pitchfork | 7.6/10 |
| Q | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Spin | 8/10 |
Poison Season is the tenth studio album from Destroyer, released on August 28, 2015 by Merge Records and Dead Oceans Records.
The first song released from Poison Season, "Dream Lover", was posted on SoundCloud on May 21, 2015. The album's release date, track list, and artwork were announced the same day.
A second song from Poison Season, "Girl in a Sling", was released online on July 8, 2015. On the same day, the music video for "Girl in a Sling", directed by David Galloway, was released. The video cuts back and forth between shots of Bejar, who's working in a darkroom and singing in the shadows, and residential areas in decay. Director David Galloway explained in a press release that the video's tragic tone is meant to fit the album's overall vibe:
Bejar sings a lot about cities and girls and injury, sometimes all at the same time. Sometimes they are the same thing, as surreal novelists would have us believe. Besides, people like to see Dan sing—which he doesn't do a lot of in this video, but he does do a little bit. We wanted to make a video that dealt with central Destroyer themes: to some, Destroyer is a lech; to some, he is an arsonist; to some, he is a savior. To me, he is the consummate comedian, but he resists that role. So we decided to go the opposite way and make something sad, something tragic, something that fits the new record. The adage “comedy equals tragedy plus time” is attributed to Carol Burnett's mum. Or it might have been Steve Allen. Either way, I always want Dan to do physical comedy, but he resists. He's a natural, though. He's the Pacific Northwest's Buster Keaton, and I hope one day to share that with the world. One day. For now, though, there's just this sadness. This poison season.
A third song from Poison Season, "Times Square", was released on August 12, 2015 on SoundCloud. On August 27, 2015, a day before Poison Season's release, a stop motion music video for "Times Square", directed by Shayne Ehman, was released. The music video features Dan Bejar singing to the camera as a number of anthropomorphized forest friends rendered with stop-motion animation sing and dance along. The director, Shayne Ehman, described the process of making the video:
We ended up just wandering around New York til 3am and the city seemed completely dead. We could have been anywhere, really. I needed to get outside and shoot in natural light in order to serve as a sort of conduit for those 'forces of nature in love...' which seem to rule the song. I let the sun do its thing and let the earth do it's thing and watched time unfold. I watched the clouds unfold and unpack and packup. I was at their mercy, completely.
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