Nihilists With Good Imaginations

Upon listening to the new Of Montreal album (yes I'm a blogging cliche) I find myself being drawn to the darker, more emotionally convoluted songs on the album than the poppier, albeit still emotionally convoluted, songs. If you haven't heard it I suggest doing the hearing because its a fantastic album. Much more easy to listen to completely than Sunlandic Twins or Satanic Panic.

That latter album I enjoy, but towards the middle I start to lose interest. Somewhere around the treacly city bird. Nevertheless! Satanic Panic has my (and most people's) fav O' Montreal track: Lysergic Bliss.

The compositional chops of that song sticks me with a bayonet, twists it, and throws me out the side of Kevin Barnes' technicolored parapet. Its impossible to resist such an intelligently executed vocal arrangement that manages to both hearken back to the beach boys and still break from the inexplicable botulistic paralysis the boys manage to hold over vocal arrangements in rock music to this day. Barnes did a bit on Sunlandic Twins as well, not as impressively as Satanic Panic, but well enough.

The new album, however, does not utilize as much of those crrrraaazy vocals that I laud Of Montreal for. actually, Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer is the album that the second half of The Sunlandic Twins merely mentioned in passing. It's more of an off-broadway phantom of the opera gig than the productions of their past. Dark twisting pipes, silly but affecting lyrics, constant and chugging riffage: they sound like
pyrotechnics/swinging chandelier/gasping audience on this album. But its all smoke and mirrors deflecting, and thus drawing, attention to Barnes' depression and crumbling marriage. but there is a whole lot more beneath the surface than the music ia initially willing to reveal, and so it is more rewarding than Andrew Lloyd Weber's entire catalogue, except maybe cats.

Enough of that hubub, bub - The following is one of my favorite tracks off of the new album because it is really the only one that draws up bridge blueprints between the band circa Satanic Panic, an exit at "Wraith Pinned to the Mist" on Sunlandic Twins, and now. Those vocals I said were missing from this album are in full force here, though not as impressively helixed as lysergic bliss, they do their job, they do. actually, a good majority of the music here is Barnes' voice, a humpty dumpty bass, a drum track and a few paper-football keyboard flicks.

Listen:
Of Montreal - Gronlandic Edit

Its kind of a crime to post this song and leave out the following two tracks, considering they're all cogs in a three part Spacely sprocket machine. Especially the long and heartbeating centerpiece of the album "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal." but I'm doing my best here dammit. Just go out and buy the album.

Of Montreal