The howls and catharsis of "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal" are the disc's highlight, building steam over nearly 12 minutes into a jittery Bowie-esque soundscape, Barnes raving about the state of his heart to a swelling, monotonous background of electronic beats, coos, squeals and riffs. "It's like we weren't made for this world / Though I wouldn't really want to meet someone who was," he says at one point. The song's heft comes from its sheer tension, the sensation that something huge is at stake here. The track divides the album cleanly in two parts - a "down" side and an "up" side.
Hissing Fauna does feel a bit on the long side, though. The second half of the disc, coming after the massively emotional "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal," is a little light and twee, with a few rambling, unfocused jam-pop melodies that lack the tightness of the album's best tracks.
While it's not the easiest album that will come out of 2007, Hissing Fauna is definitely one of the most ambitious. And it's a grower – I'm already a lot fonder of it than I was the first few times I listened to it, wondering, "what is this lunacy?" Kevin Barnes is doing something quite unique on the remote edges of the mainstream – of Montreal isn't a bad place to be.
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1 - Connie Phillips
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2 - Connie Phillips
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