Kevin Barnes has never been one for clarity. The longtime Of Montreal front man and confessed acidhead stuffs his songs with lyrics so verbose and allusive, so strange and esoteric, that the music surrounding them threatens to pale in comparison. Listening to “Rapture Rapes the Muses” or “Lysergic Bliss,” two headliners from his earlier album “Satanic Panic in the Attic,” gives one the impression that Barnes was abandoned in a library at birth and raised by a pack of wild dictionaries. Fortunately, Barnes has the good sense, not to mention the ability, to compose music that can compete with his poetry.
Built from seemingly infinite layers of funk progressions, buzzing synthesizers, and repetitive bass lines, your average Of Montreal song makes the Grateful Dead sound like a wedding band. And if “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?” is any indication, the band’s momentum shows no sign of flagging. On the contrary, the band is as energized as ever, and in “Hissing Fauna,” it has not only kept its lyrical edge and ecstatic harmonies, it has expanded its emotional scope, creating what might well be its best record to date.
The band’s success would not be a surprise if not for the fact that “Hissing Fauna” is its heaviest concept album. Never before has Barnes weighted an LP with such narrative responsibility. The first six tracks lead up to a 12-minute epic, “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,” which details Barnes’s transformation into an alter-ego named Georgie Fruit. The following five tracks gradually ebb in emotional intensity, ending eventually in a fading chorus of repeated “ah’s.” More-erudite-than-thou references include Cato, Caesar’s political rival; Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”; Faberge, a 19th century Russian jewelry firm; and Kongsvinger, a town in southern Norway renowned for its talented soccer players. Topics covered include the benefits of chemical addiction (“Chemicals don’t strangle my pen,” Barnes says), loneliness, the strength of gravity, and rejection, all revolving around Barnes’ separation from his wife, Nina Twin (the two reconciled shortly before the album’s release). This is a behemoth of an album, a musical “Waste Land” that could easily have gone south had Barnes capitulated to the urge of the immature musician—that is, the urge to depict one’s condition as endlessly bleak, poisoning his music with immature self-pity.
Instead, Barnes stays faithful to the emotional rollercoaster that often accompanies a serious trauma. He documents with obsessive fervor the mood swings he experiences, often changing tack in the middle of a song to plummet from the heights of a piercing synth swell to a noiseless pit of languid bass and muted vocals. At one point he slices a song (“Cato As a Pun”) in half with a simple question—“Is that too much to ask?”—before cranking up the volume and delivering the catchiest thirty seconds the band has ever recorded. And when the aforementioned epic, “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,” finally reaches the end of its angst-ridden arc (“I need you here and not here too!” Barnes cries, repeatedly), Barnes picks up the pieces and declares, in a line that every lovelorn male should write on his wall: “Eva, I’m sorry, but you will never have me; to me you’re just some faggy girl, and I need a girl with Soul Power.”
The band has always been at its most powerful when its members embrace their penchant for extremity, and nowhere is this more evident than on “Hissing Fauna.” Like Robert Plant and Dan Auerbach before him, Kevin Barnes has managed to channel his heartache into his music, resulting in an electric amalgam of emotion that perfectly encapsulates the breakup experience.
And all within the framework of a story. Amazing.
Rating: 9.5/10
Leave a Reply