Of Montreal

xpost there's a link to a review i wrote about that album upthread. it's a curate's egg. for me the whole thing kind of shattered a lot of the illusions he'd built up for me around HFAYTD and SL. like watching a really good movie that ends in such a frustrating and terrible way that it kills all sympathy for the director and actors.

Just so enamored with "Imbecile Rages" from that NPR video I linked to above. Realized today that that snatch of Dylan melody in there comes from "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." (Couldn't place it at first.)

New album in fall:

http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/crossfade/2013/04/of_montreal_kevin_barnes_interview_lousy_with_sylvianbriar.php

deserves new thread!

Another one? The guy doesn't stop. Somehow I wish he'd settle back and take a bit more time over his stuff. He's ultra talented but it feels like he's burning through material at a rate of knots when really he could make another hissing-fauna masterpiece.

so this has leaked. anyone heard it yet? i was a full-fledged up through sunlandic twins, enjoyed a lot of hissing fauna, didn't like skeletal lamping much at all, and thought false priest was awful. does this one continue the trajectory?

...or will i have to listen to it myself and form my own opinion?!

*shivers*

first impression: best since 'hissing fauna'. there are honest to goodness songs instead of overstuffed psych-disco collages

that would be a start

HF and SL are classics in my book

here is the thread for the new album: of Montreal - Lousy with Sylvianbria

that's weird, i even did a search for Sylvianbria and didn't find anything. i must have spelled it incorrectly.

Thoughts on the new single?

http://pitchfork.com/news/65869-of-montreal-announce-new-album-innocence-reaches-share-new-song-its-different-for-girls-listen/

To my ears it's one of the catchier, more coherent songs he's done in a while (not that I've been paying very close attention). Lyrically, sounds like he's still, um, working through some stuff…

Not a Joe Jackson cover? For shame!

Real talk though, I've been caning Aureate Gloom for the last few days. It's fucking amazing and maybe one of the best albums of recent years. Let's give this a listen with high hopes then. .

yo this is a cool new sonic tack from kevin <3

haven't quite parsed the layers in the lyrics yet. will assign the case to tt

video is fun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_WDugKPnlk

haven't listened to anything by them post-false priest but this seems promising.

new album, this guy is a machine.

this sounds better to me than the material on the previous album, looking forward to seeing it live

I'm a big fan so I have time for every recent album he's made. But I'm hoping the single is an indication he's heading back to more fun and catchy material. Too much anger and misery over the last few albums

Innocence Reaches is now available for streaming on NPR First Listen

hmm

so is this going to be shit or not?

I'm a massive fan and I think this is kind of middling. It has some great moments (Chaos Arpeggiating in particular stands out for me), but overall it's a bit 'light'. It doesn't have the seething anger of the previous album, nor is it as obnoxiously fun as something like Skeletal Lamping. A couple of the tracks sound like reworkings of old material too. I'm still going to listen to it A LOT.

Paralytic Stalks was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

In a good way, right? Well, this is considerably less psychedelic and sprawling than that. Two of the tracks have trap beats...

I think Kevin is at his best when full monster.

nah, i pretty much hated that album. and yeah i loved skeletal lamping. just got sick of his passive aggressive whining really.

That's fair enough. There's a *bit* less of that here, especially as compared with Aureate Gloom.

I thought AG was really cool, and it only got better with repeated listens

It really grew on me too and overall is probably my 3rd favourite. It's a vicious album with some amazing crescendos.

Now youre going too far...

dl AG might be worth a listen, its really in the same vein as the amazing run from Satanic Panic to Skeketal Lamping

the mediocre pitchfork review has arrived

It's a mediocre album tbf

Aureate Gloom might well be their BEST album though, it's completely wonderful

nah this blows it way imo. already has about twice as much replay value this early. there are some hints at melody this time

um...what

AG is nothing but wonderful melodies

This has one song up to that standard (Gratuitous Abysses) and one successful trap experiment (Trashed Exes) but little else to sustain me. Will relisten though

Chaos A r Peggi a ting is good too coz tt told me to say so. We're at a beer festival

I enjoyed Aureate Gloom a lot. Not heard this new one yet.

Aureate Gloom is alright, it's just Kevin's misery is starting to grate a little. He's still pretty miserable here but musically it seems much more alive and he keeps threatening to get back to proper melodies again. Either way, I think IR is twice as good

"My Fair Lady" is really nice.

I managed about a song and a half but it was quite enough for me. This guy really needs to step back and consider what he's doing. You can't make music this detailed and release as much material as he does.

i had no idea what to play today so i decided to throw on this new album, Innocence Reaches. the single seemed too forced for me so i didn't know what to expect. the first half didn't grab me but continued to play it. the album seemed to get more and more psychedelic as i went on, very 60s. i think i might actually like this album, looking forward to playing it again in the next few days.

trying to listen to Innocence Reaches. I don't say this about too many albums but this is nigh-unlistenable. It just sounds like a huge mess. Kevin's lyrics are wooden and don't so much as rub-up against the music than barely attempt to work with it. The music itself regularly goes into sections that sound like a mistake that should have been sorted out in the early stages of mixing.

new album White is Relic/Irrealis Mood out March 9 on Polyvinyl

Two important events occurred during the making of White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood. I became “Simulated Reality” paranoid and I fell in LOVE.

Well a lot more happened during the process of writing and recording, but those are the two big ones. I also reached a healthy point of self-forgiveness for my failed marriage and became deeply educated in the lies of America the Great.

I feel like a switch was recently turned on in my brain and now I’m beginning to see through the lies that have been fed to me my whole life by the masters of media and by those who control and manipulate the narrative of our cultural identity and social order.

My paranoia began during the presidential election cycle and reached a dangerous peak shortly after the inauguration. In the meantime I watched and read countless works of art in a mad effort to be reminded of how many truly brilliant people there are living/struggling among us and to try to maintain a positive outlook. The works of Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, Chris Kraus, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the Autobiographies of Malcolm X and Mark E Smith were all great inspirations, to name a few.

Musically, I was very inspired by the extended dance mixes that people used to make for pop singles back in the ‘80s. It’s so cool how a lot of the 80’s hits had these really intricate and interesting longer versions that wouldn’t get played on the radio and could only be heard in the clubs. I used that template with these tracks, I wanted them all to feel like the extended “club edit” of album tracks.

I also decided to abandon the “live band in a room” approach that I had been using on the recent albums and work more on my own or remotely with collaborators. I used the same drum sample packs throughout because I wanted the album to have a rhythmic continuity to it. I wanted the drums to have a strong and consistent identity, similar to how Prince’s Linn Electronics LM-1 drum machine played such an important role on his classic albums. Zac Colwell also played a huge role on this album, adding saxophones and synths to most of the songs. I also got a lot of help from long time collaborators, and “of Montreal” touring members, Clayton Rychlik and JoJo Glidewell.

The two title concept came to me when I was thinking about how difficult it is to frame the message of a song with just one title, because so often the songs are about so many different subjects. ‘White Is Relic’ was inspired by James Baldwin’s writings regarding the creation and propagation of a toxic American White identity. I’ve come to learn how it’s just a tool wielded by the 1% to give poor white people a false sense of superiority in an effort to keep the masses placated and numb to how deeply we’re all getting fucked by our capitalist rulers. An ‘Irrealis Mood’ is a linguistic indicator that something isn’t yet reality but does have the potential to become so.

I’m always searching for new identities so this concept of the death of “Whiteness” appeals to me greatly. Might be the only way to save the world.

-Kevin Barnes, January 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuFw4IZWOUE

show i saw last april was fantastic, wasn't really familiar with anything past Skeletal Lamping and the new stuff sounded great. the new song is very much in the vein of that show and the EDM vibe of Rune Husk/Innocence Reaches

Musically, I was very inspired by the extended dance mixes that people used to make for pop singles back in the ‘80s. It’s so cool how a lot of the 80’s hits had these really intricate and interesting longer versions that wouldn’t get played on the radio and could only be heard in the clubs. I used that template with these tracks, I wanted them all to feel like the extended “club edit” of album tracks.

this is p much word for word neil tennant's explanation for how 'introspective' came to be

OM is probably the single band I'd describe as the most truly unpredictable when it comes to how good their next release will be. hopefully this one will follow 'innocence' with the pattern of 'lousy' -> 'aureate' in that a new sound will be prototyped and then gloriously realised

otm re unpredictability of quality. I loved the two "live in a room" psych-rock albums - felt like a new resurgence - but the last album did nothing for me. The new song is decent. and lol at another artist just now deciding/discovering capitalism is bad

yeah it strikes me that he should have been realising this stuff maybe twenty years ago?

and agree that the last album was kind of off

i think it's a marketing tactic