OF MONTREAL
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Polyvinyl
· Kevin Barnes and company offer another serving of avant-disco electro pop, with a side of depression.
Stylistically, the latest Of Montreal release (the 13th, it should be noted) contains the same tender ingredients used to fashion the last two – Satanic Panic in the Attic (2004) and 2005’s crossover success The Sunlandic Twins. The shimmering, electronic arrangements are here, as are the danceable disco basslines, the pretentiously wordy song titles and, most importantly, lead Montrealer Kevin Barnes’s falsetto-inflected vocal stylings.Lyrically, however, this is a whole new ballgame. While Satanic Panic was all about falling in love, and Sunlandic Twins traversed the subsequent feelings (with wonderfully poetic lyrics like "you’re such a mystery, I just want to stand and stare/ nibble on your ear and smell the ocean in your hair") while escaping into wildly fantastic realms, Hissing Fauna finds Barnes now hindered by a few fresh issues.These songs were penned during an extended stay in his wife Nina’s hometown of Oslo, while she and Barnes took advantage of the health benefits offered to artists as their daughter Alabee was born. Since the majority of his time is spent in Athens, Barnes experienced significant culture shock during these travels and subsequently spiralled into depression, drinking and near divorce. Taken in this context, Hissing Fauna is a powerful and often-brilliant sonic diary.
"Suffer for Fashion" starts with the sound of a gurgling baby (Alabee, presumably), before launching into an upbeat octopad-propelled pop. But using a trick perfected by Brian Wilson, the lyrics tell a different story altogether, as Barnes pleads, "if we’ve got to burn out, let’s do it together." Similarly, "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" creates a synthetic string-led soundtrack to an imaginary video game, while describing Barnes’s failed escapism through "chemicals.""Gronlandic Edit" plays like the sequel to Sunlandic Twins’s smash single (reworked into an Outback Steakhouse jingle) "Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)." Yet while the previous song described bizarre celebrations, this one is about the anxieties felt during grocery shopping. The words broach all of this, as Barnes details, "the party people dancing for the indie star/ but he's the worst faker by far/ and it's sad."
The centrepiece of the record, however, is the grandiose 12-minute track, "The Past is a Grotesque Animal." With his first stab at an auto-bio epic, Barnes tells the story of his relationship from the courting stages to the turbulent present, while the music bounces along with the meticulous pop majesty that only he can assemble. After this immense emotional expulsion, the songs switch to less intimate subject matter and become a whole lot sillier. "Bunny Ain’t No Kind of a Rider," in all of its politically incorrect glory, contains an unbelievably catchy chorus. "Labyrinthian Pomp" sounds strangely like Prince, both musically and in lyrical braggadocio. Closer "We Were Born the Mutants Again Without Leafling" does return partially to the themes of the album’s first half, but by this point the feeling is all but forgotten. In the end, Hissing Fauna comes off like a two-act play that perhaps should have been split into separate productions. Like The Mountain Goats’s masterful divorce-drama Tallahassee, in comparison to its less-personal followup We Shall All Be Healed, this album’s first seven songs offer the main course, while the rest taste more like leftovers.
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