Merge has reissued Destroyer’s Your Blues on vinyl, marking its first appearance in that format in the US and Europe. For the occasion, Canadian music writer Michael Barclay wrote of the album:

Your Blues is luxurious pop presented as high drama, the ideal sonic setting for Bejar’s oft-arch, oft-parodied delivery. It’s here, not in front of a rock band, where his voice is actually most at home: in a world where nothing sounds real, and everything is possible and wondrous and exclamatory. Pity the poor believers in “purity” and “authenticity,” tired and meaningless words that should never be applied to any art form, least of all pop music. (“So, Great Pretender, pull a face!”) Bejar’s sloganeering—Your Blues contains some of his most memorable phrases, almost as many as Streethawk—is all the more powerful when presented in contrast to the synthetic veneer.

“People say, ‘They just didn’t want it enough.’ Oh, but we were the Music Lovers!” Destroyer doesn’t want what you think he wants; he doesn’t want what you think he should, as a so-called rock singer. He’s called Destroyer for a reason. On Your Blues, Bejar made it crystal clear that your blues are your business; they have nothing to do with his art or wherever he decides to take it. Dan Bejar never went back to Your Blues—not even while touring the record, which involved the B.C. band Frog Eyes pummeling these songs to the ground as only a Beefheartish art-rock band could. (You can hear the results on the Notorious Lightning EP, featuring six reworked versions of Your Blues songs; it seemed almost an apology to rockist snobs.) Your Blues sounds like nothing else in the Destroyer discography, which is exactly why it should be celebrated, cherished—and reissued on vinyl.