Poison Season
Poison Season is the tenth studio album by Canadian indie rock band Destroyer, released on August 28, 2015 by Merge Records and Dead Oceans Records. Release. 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: 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: Critical reception. "Poison Season" received widespread critical acclaim from music critics upon its release. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 86, based on 26 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Jayson Greene of "Pitchfork" gave the album a favorable review stating, ""Poison Season" retains the sumptuous melancholy of "Kaputt", leavening it with the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra. There are string arrangements  all over "Poison Season", and they are gorgeously recorded: the orchestra on "Girl in a Sling" sounds like 180-gram vinyl even while in earbuds. Destroyer has always partly been a nostalgia project, even when Bejar's nostalgia was decidedly ersatz—his records aim to stir the feelings that classic recordings arouse in us. "" hearkened back to glam-rock Bowie even if the resemblance was off, and the magic of "Kaputt" was partly that of a peculiar and gnomic figure like Bejar conjuring the jaded romanticism of Bryan Ferry. On "Poison Season", he visits a different section of his record  collection, one that predates rock'n'roll, and he applies all the studied love and imagination to the endeavor we've come to expect from him."