City of Daughters tracklist & album art

Last sum­mer I spent a lot of time lis­ten­ing to Destroyer’s City of Daugh­ters. I only had it on vinyl and it lived exclu­sively on my turntable for the bet­ter part of two or three months. I would lis­ten to it on repeat for hours, drink­ing beer at my tiny kitchen table, soak­ing in the humid­ity of a Sat­ur­day after­noon in Lit­tle Italy.

I refused to lis­ten to it in any other for­mat, because the record had become so per­sonal to me, I needed that tac­til­ity of flip­ping over the record and the inti­macy of only lis­ten­ing to it alone in my apartment.

Finally I moved to Cam­bridge last Decem­ber, mark­ing the end of that strange, lonely period of my life, and decided I could move on, that the qual­ity of the album demanded that I have it avail­able on my iPod if I needed it on the sub­way. I was lis­ten­ing to it dig­i­tally for the first time, and I was star­tled when I heard “The Space Race” imme­di­ately after “No Cease Fires!” I had been trained through count­less lis­tens to know that “The Space Race” begins side B of the album, with that abrupt open­ing. I thought for sure my iPod was just fuck­ing up again, but when I came home I real­ized “The Space Race” was actu­ally tagged as track 3.

I won­dered how this could have hap­pened, so I looked up track­lists online. As it turns out, both MusicBrainz’ entry and even Merge Records’ own Destroyer cat­a­log list “The Space Race” as track 3. Which means there are two pos­si­bil­i­ties: either the Merge site was used as a ref­er­ence for poorly-tagged mp3s, or the CD release actu­ally sports a dif­fer­ent track order. My money’s on the for­mer, so re-tag your files and hear it the way it was sup­posed to be heard.

1. Com­ments on the World as Will
2. No Cease Fires! (Crimes Against the State of Our Love, Baby)
3. Dark Pur­poses
4. Emax I
5. I Want This Cyclops
6. Loves of a Gnostic
7. Emax II
8. State of the Union
9. School, and the Girls Who Go There
10. The Space Race
11. Melanie and Jen­nifer and Melanie
12. War on Jazz II or How I Learned to Love the War on Jazz
13. Emax III
14. You Were So Cruel
15. Signs
16. Reread­ing the Mar­ble Faun
17. Son of the Earth

And here’s a hi-res pic­ture of the cover art, a slightly out-of-focus one, but, as far as I can tell, the only decent one avail­able online.