Invoking Bob Dylan has become a kind of Godwin's Law of rock journalism—once you do it, you've already sabotaged your point. But there is no better reference point for Destroyer's Rubies, the sixth and best effort by Vancouver's Destroyer, than The Basement Tapes. Like that album, Rubies is big, dense, dizzying and baffling, a record that CliffsNotes rock history at the same time it seeks to destroy it. Destroyer is the brainchild of sometime New Pornographer Dan Bejar, and with Rubies he draws on late '70s American rock, gospel and psych-country to honor and to skewer.

Destroyer: Destroyer's Rubies (Merge)

The record's biggest target is what Bejar refers to as "the wealthy American underground," and his persistent rock referencing seems a sly allusion to that audience's obsession with cataloging, erm, allusions. But Rubies' sights are set beyond mere indie provincialism. Against cascades of piano and skronking sax and limber electric guitars, Bejar rants like he's trying to summarize the last 25 years of pop culture, putting a final marble slab over the secrecy and the obscurity of the rock underground—two qualities killed by the Internet's gifts of instant access and the ability to instantly document the rewards of that access.

Bejar hints at meaning but never fully spells it out, alluding to his own records just as frequently as he alludes to others ("Watercolours Into the Ocean" references The Band, R.E.M., and Destroyer's This Night over the course of its five minutes). The layers of text and meta-text and meta-meta-text keep getting deeper until Rubies eventually begins to twist back on itself. At the halfway mark, Bejar bellows: "I swear somewhere the truth lies within this wood/ I swear 'Looter's Follies' has never sounded so good." The name of the song that contains this lyric is, of course, "Looter's Follies."

The record ends with "Sick Priest Learns to Last Forever," a song that mimics both the cadence and the stuttering guitar solo of Neil Young's "Down By the River." But where that song's repeated mantra of "I shot my baby" was unspeakably bleak, Bejar, in his own odd way, offers hope: "Yes, it's fine/ It's been the same most every time/ The sick priest will learn to last forever." Dylan could hardly have said it any better.