The Elegant Sound of Coming Apart

Dan Bejar named his record Kaputt—broken, in German—and then made something that sounds almost suspiciously intact: saxophone, flute, soft synthesizers, production that evokes the most expensive lounge bars of 1983. It is an album about dissolution that refuses to dissolve. Bejar’s voice drifts through at an angle, literary and sardonic, singing about cocaine and failure and desire with the detachment of a man reading a report about his own life. The tension between the lushness of the sound and the wreckage in the lyrics is where the whole thing lives, and it holds together better than it has any right to.