Main Destroyer Daniel Bejar, last heard from on the wonderful New Pornographers album Mass Romantic working with ex-Zumpano writer Carl Newman, here returns to his main band and their follow-up to last year's Thief. Given the buzz the New Pornographers' CD has generated, you might expect Bejar to amp up the glam factor that fabulized Thief - but no, Streethawk is actually more subdued, more subtle, than either of the last two recordings Bejar sang on. But that doesn't make it any less impressive an album. Relying on the basics - guitars (electric and acoustic), bass, piano, organ, drums - and sounding like a band playing together in a room, Destroyer seems a bit of a throwback here, but the songs are strong, cunningly arranged, and have lyrics of cynical intrigue worth listening to. The album's title, and the fact that it begins and ends with tracks called "Streethawk I" and "Streethawk II," suggest there's some sort of story here. Could be - many tracks make reference to seventies rock, like the extended coda to "The Bad Arts" whose lyrics run "you've got the spirit, don't lose that feeling" (which, if it isn't an actual seventies chorus, should have been*), or "The Sublimation Hour," which seems to be a sort of update of "All the Young Dudes" both in its structure and cynical, slightly hectoring lyric with references to rock'n'roll's glories past (both "yesterday" and "gone"). It also manages the neat trick of referencing and collapsing two distinctly mythologized rock'n'roll eras by quoting the Clash's line "phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust." Elsewhere, "Virgin with a Memory" evokes a Brazilian feel with its two nylon guitars, and its opening lines - "Was it the movie or the making of 'Fitzcarraldo' / where someone learned to love again? / 'I can't remember' is not the same as 'I don't know'" - once puzzled out, seem to suggest quite a lot about this album: obsession, nostalgia, artifice, willfulness, denial. And as Bejar sings elsewhere, "but isn't that what rock'n'roll is all about?" * I'm an idiot: when I initially wrote the review, I airspaced on the Joy Division song this quotes.

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