Music Review: of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

Of Montreal isn't for everyone. Labyrinthine lyrics circle beguilingly around synthesized, twistingly psychedelic disco-rock. Their latest album, the dark and questing Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, is like the sound of a nervous breakdown with a beat you can dance to.

The Athens, Ga.,-based group of Montreal sprang out of the mind of Kevin Barnes. A shifting collective with Barnes at the center, of Montreal has explored the fringes of pop in a series of albums, changing styles with abandon. Hissing Fauna, of Montreal's eighth album, is a darker, more self-obsessed turn than the more gleeful pop of the previous work. A loose concept album about depression and elation, Hissing Fauna uses music as a muse. Barnes, who wrote and recorded much of this alone, dealt with suddenly living in a foreign country, a new child, marriage concerns and more in a chaotic year. Hissing Fauna is him trying to make sense of it all. "I tried to sort of uplift my life with sound," he has said in interviews. And he throws them all in this record.

Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? is lavishly orchestrated pop, complete with an elaborate fold-out case that resembles a blooming hippie flower. Song titles that are almost willfully goofy – "Sink The Seine," "Gronlandic Edit," "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" – are tacked onto some ornate, creative and occasionally infuriatingly bizarre songs. It's the party of "Saturday Night Fever" meets Morrissey with a dash of Guided By Voices and Pavement. Of Montreal's spinning electric frenzy may turn off as many as it appeals to. But the soaring highs and crashing lows cohere into a dazzlingly creative if imperfect album.

Take the first track, "Suffer For Fashion," which launches along on keyboard riffs and optimistic choruses that could've come straight out of an Erasure concert. It's followed soon by "Cato As A Pun," which crashes down to earth in a lonely disco groove. "I guess you just want to shave your head/ have a drink and be left alone," Barnes laments. It's the sound of crisis being explored, like the funhouse '80s pop of "Heimsdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse" (again with the oddball song titles!), turning to drugs as a curative, or the explosive lust of "Gronlandic Edit," which has a lullingly grand sway that erupts into a falsetto siren. "I just want to hold the divine in mine / and forget," Barnes cries out.

Article Author: Nik Dirga

An American journalist who now lives in New Zealand, Nik Dirga writes whenever the mood strikes him about books, music, movies, pop culture and more.

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