Dan's Boogie

Even listeners familiar with Dan Bejar’s trip can find first encounters with a new album forbidding, a door slammed in your face when you’d shown up looking for a good time. A misty buffet of variety-show pop (“Dan’s Boogie”), Bowie-style glam (“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”) and fake tropical jazz (“Cataract Time”), Dan’s Boogie is—like a lot of his albums since 2011’s Kaputt—both featherlight and impenetrably dense, filled with chintzy musical touches (the maudlin piano runs on “The Same Thing as Nothing at All”) and lyrical asides so flatly stated that the words strain against their meaning (“The Ignoramus of Love”: “I remix horses”). He’s funny, he’s surprising, he’s (ugh) “literate”, but most of all, you get the sense that he’s always nudging himself toward the unknown—a quality that commands respect when a lazier man would settle for a like.