“Destroyer’s Rubies” (Merge), the seventh album from Vancouver’s Destroyer, falls somewhere between a poetry reading and a rock opera and is evocative of both. The first (and title track) opens with a moment of discordant narration: “Dueling cyclones jacknifed / they got eyes for your wife / and the blood that lives in her heart,” Daniel Bejar sings. Words spill out in impassioned rushes over the next nine and a half minutes; music thins to an acoustic strum, then ascends in voluptuous swells.

The career of Bejar, Destroyer’s principal (and sometimes only) member, spans the same range. Only a few years ago he was best-known as a sometimecontributor to the New Pornographers. But today he has emerged as his own man with a series of delightfully intricate and abstruse Destroyer albums.

Critics tend to hear echoes of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and early Tyrannosaurus Rex in Bejar’s music: Dylan in the swirling, reference-laden wordplay, Bowie in the swooping, theatrical singing, and Marc Bolan’s psych-folk flair in the unruly delivery and arrangements. Bejar is not as ambitious as any of these heroes; it’s hard to imagine a movement crystallizing around him, for instance.But in his retiring way he’s just as free, and as a result he navigates by his own lights and charts new territory.

Whereas previous Destroyer efforts have explored high-flown glam (“This Night”), MIDI and synth sounds (“Your Blues”), and “spazz rock” (compliments of backing band Frog Eyes on “Notorious Lightning and Other Works”), the songs on “Rubies” have a lush, earthbound quality.”Your Blood” is a jangly, raggy blues; “3000 Flowers” is a swallowed version of the hazy shoegazer sound of the Raveonettes; “Sick Priests Learn To Last Forever” sounds (uncharacteristically) like a funk outfit warming up a crowd while the bandleader waits in the wings. But the most pronounced influence is Van Morrison, heard in the bright drums, the warm, calligraphic guitar, and the boozy “Domino”-like sax. Bejar even quotes Morrison at one point, singing, “Have I told you lately that I love you?” But he twists the next line and adds,”Did I fail to mention there’s a sword hanging above you?”

Part of what makes Destroyer so compelling (if not always appealing) is Bejar’s striving snobbery and willful obfuscation. His interest in books, art, and music far outstrips that of the typical nerd-chic collegiates from whose ranks most indie rockers are drawn. Bejar pooh-poohs them: “It’s just your precious American underground and it’s born of wealth / with not a writer in the lot,” he sings on “Rubies.”

Bejar affects a kind of effete post-MFA pose. He’s a dandy in everything but appearance. On 2001’s “Streethawk: A Seduction,” his breakthrough album and the one that attracted the attention of Merge Records, he recorded a song named for the proudly literary publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The lyrics read like an overwrought manuscript: “The wealthy dowager, the patroness / she guessed it, the answer wasn’t yes / her maxims were fine, the ethos that flew about her mind / like swallows in search of a burntdown belltower church.”

On “Destroyer’s Rubies”Bejar is preoccupied with painting, painters, and pretenders. Song titles such as “European Oils,” “Watercolours Into the Ocean,” and “Painter in Your Pocket” suggest self-parody, but one suspects Bejar means them in earnest. At one point he confesses to being shot down by “a famous Toronto painter,” and elsewhere muses: “Why can’t you see that a life in art and a life of mimicry, it’s the same thing?”

Bejar always has much to say but says nothing directly. His lyrics are artful glimpses that never add up to a complete picture: “I made a tomb for all the incompatible cells I could take / and I brought bells to the wake … I was good with names / I had a way with faces / I was the dominant theme in a number of places …When I’m at war I insist on slaughter and getting it on with the hangman’s daughter,” he sings cryptically on “European Oils.” With such lyrics one can only guess what this or any other one song is about. Imprecision is at the core of his art.

The Internet abounds with efforts to unpack Bejar’s metaphors and references, to guess at his larger meanings. Weeks before its official release, “Rubies” had already been subjected to a thorough exegesis. According to one Destroyer wiki, the album contains nods to and quotes from, among others, Aeschylus, Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding, the Smiths, Ike and Tina Turner, the Beatles, Albert Camus, Incredible String Band, Ezra Pound, the gospel according to Luke, Lou Reed, My Bloody Valentine, Queen Elizabeth, and a pulp lesbian novel by Gale Wilhelm. There are also numerous references to other Destroyer albums and songs, suggesting that Bejar already considers himself a subject ripe for knowing reference. He has made himself a part of his own elaborate guessing game.