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Of Montreal
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

Released in 2007

9.7/10

Styles
Electro-pop
Glam rock
Singer/Songwriter

Song Highlights
Heimdalsgate Like a Promethian Curse
The Past is a Grotesque Animal
Faberge Falls for Shuggie

For a long time now, Of Montreal have been one of those reliable bands that consistently churn out "solid" albums, year after year. They haven't really done anything you could call a "masterpiece" during their career, and 1999's The Gay Parade is probably the album to come the closest to being worthy of that kind of label. More recently, 2004's Satanic Panic in the Attic turned out to be a delightfully fun album, but once again we're talking about something which stops at being merely "a great collection of songs", rather than a flat-out work of genius.

It's for these reasons that this year's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is an unexpected pleasure of the greatest proportions. For a band so reknowned for delivering B+ recordings time and again to suddenly release an album this good is a monumental surprise. Make no mistake - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is as exceptional as its title is ridiculous. We're talking about one of the best albums I've ever heard, this year or any other.

Hissing Fauna is essentially a loose concept album, revolving heavily around all the negative aspects (social and emotional) of relationships gone wrong. Lead singer and central songwriter Kevin Barnes has clearly had plenty of life-experience when it comes to the rise and fall of train-wreck relationships (in fact, since previous album The Sunlandic Twins he was supposedly separated from his wife and daughter and fell into serious depression), and he draws on this extensively throughout the album. The tracks are deliberately sequenced to allow Barnes' to personally develop throughout the heavily autobiographical work, beginning with anxiety and emotional dysfuntion, then channeling into angry catharsis, and finally into the oh-so-fabulous emergence of his glam-rock alter-ego, known as "Georgie Fruit", for the album's highly ostentatious second-half.

From the very beginning of opening track "Suffer for Fashion", it's quite apparent that Of Montreal have made a huge dynamic shift away from the retro-styled, guitar-based pop music of previous works, into exuberant, full-blown electropop. The track sounds ridiculously overblown right from the beginning, with speedy, jittering synths and manic vocals propelling it along with incredible momentum. The album reaches a desperate feeling of almost crashing out as Barnes hysterically wails "If we've got to burn out let's do it together / Let's all melt down together!", giving the sense that this is quite genuinely a man holding onto normality by the tiniest of threads.

Psuedo-instrumental "Sink the Seine" acts as a momentary breather, slowing the pace for all of one minute with mid-tempo synths and vocal harmonies, before "Cato as a Pun" moves into slinky loungetronica, loaded with buzzing keys, chirping guitar licks and Barnes' measured, confronting vocal. Lyrics like "Please confuse my every decision" and "What has happened to you and I, and don't say that I have changed / Cause man, of course I have" perfectly encapsulate the themes of confusion, alienation and frustration which tie directly into the album's central concept.

With "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse", the album fully hits maximum pace, as Barnes' frantically pleads with his own seretonin levels for some degree of inner-peace, via repeated chants of "C'mon mood shift, shift back to 'good' again" and "Chemicals ... I'm always so dubious of your intent / Like I can't afford to replace what you've spent" All this is bustled along to an incredibly catchy synth melody and pumping snare beat, making the track a great combo of thought-provoking lyrics and dancefloor-filling melody.

"Grodlandic Edit" is another highlight, with its groovy bassline and speak-sung verses, which lead into one of the album's most memorable choruses - a massive burst of multitracked, layered falsetto. The excellent lyrics surface one again, this time as Barnes laments "I guess it would be nice to give my heart to a God, but which one? / Which one do I choose? / All the churches filled with losers / Psycho or confused / I just want to hold the divine / In mind / And forget."

The album's centrepiece and biggest highlight arrives with the twelve minute monster "The Past is a Grotesque Animal". The track represents the album's turning point, with it's pulsating, krautrock-esque backing and Barnes' anguished, vitriolic lyrical-catharsis serving as the massive peak leading into Georgie Fruit's emergence. It's a big step forward for Of Montreal - a complete departure from anything they've ever done before. Lyrically, this song leaves me in a state of total awe. There are so many brilliant, witty and insightful turns of phrase contained within, that trying to cram them all into one paragraph would be a disaster. For the sake of neatness I'll just list my favourites:

"It's so embarrassing to need someone like I do you / How can I explain? / I need you here / And not here too."

"I'm flunking out, I'm flunking out / I'm gone, I'm just gone / But at least I author my own disaster."

"Performance breakdown! / And I don't wanna hear it / I'm just not available!"

"Though our love project has so much potential / But it's like we weren't made for this world / Though I wouldn't really wanna meet someone who was."

"Somehow you've red-rovered / The Gestapo circling my heart."

"You've lived so brightly / You've altered everything."

"I fed the unraveler / The paw hellion / But even apocolypse is fleeting."

"Sometimes I wonder if you're mythologizing me like I do you."

"We want our film to be beautiful not realistic."

"Project your fears onto me / I need to view them / See there's nothing to them / I promise you there's nothing to them."

"I'm so touched by your goodness / You make me feel so criminal."

The angry, grinding synth pushes along for a couple more minutes, as though the lyrical outpouring alone isn't sufficient to fully vent Barnes' frustrations. However, once the song finally does roll to a close, the real party truly begins. A haze of blurry synth and distortion at the beginning of "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" heralds the entrance of the one and only Georgie Fruit. Given the fairly small field of glam rock alter egos in musical history, it's probably for the best that Barnes didn't make his one a Martian rockstar. From this point on, the album takes a turn into incredibly trashy, ridiculously overblown pseudo-disco, and it's a spectacle that's executed with total perfection. On "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider", an upbeat verse leads into Fruit's (ie. Barnes') frank and subdued put-down of "Eva, I'm sorry, but you will never have me / To me you're just some faggy girl, and I need a lover with soul power" before bursting into a repeated chorus chant of "You ain't got no soul power!" It's the listener's first taste of the wickedly catty change in mood that will dominate the rest of the album.

This is followed by "Faberge Falls for Shuggie", another undeniable highlight. The track opens with stretching, high-pitched synths and more of those groovy bass riffs. Once again, Fruit's vocal is overdone to the point of being ludicrous, but it just works. The mid-point of the song features a sample of a multi-tracked, hollering scream that's particularly worthy of mention.

The attitude is somehow increased again for "Labyrinthian Pomp", as Fruit crows to the listener "How you wanna tag my style? / When I am so superior / How you wanna hate a thing? / When you are so, so inferior / How you wanna mess, how you wanna mess my / Spotless interior?" before leading into the all-too-calm derision (which features a great reference to the album's title) of "Let's just say you are not the destroyer." The track closes out with a rare detour into "spaced out" territory, with a coda that is actually quite reminiscient of Pink Floyd in it's drifting, relaxed vocals. The difference is striking, but the group manage to nestle it comfortably between this track and the next such that it fits nicely.

"She's a Rejector" is driven along strongly by a great beats-and-synth combo and agitated vocal, which lend each verse a level of truly delerious energy. The chorus is one of Hissing Fauna's most blatantly mean-spirited but inescapably loveable - "Oh no! She's a rejector! / I must protect myself! / There's that girl who left me bitter / Want to pay some other girl to just walk up to her and hit her / But I can't! I can't! I can't!" It certainly left a somewhat guilty smile on my face.

Finally, after all the attention-seeking, acidic attitude of the last handful of tracks, the album draws to a close with the surprisingly tender "We Were Born the Mutants Again With Leafling". It's a relaxed little tune, with a gorgeous melody that sounds unequivocally "good-natured", thus providing a nice, mellow counterpoint to the bitchiness of the songs immediately prior. It's a great, vital inclusion, ensuring that all the fun and enjoyment of Hissing Fauna's drama remains with the listener, but the final vibe they're left with is undeniably good.

I'll say it again - Of Montreal have surprised me in a way few other artists ever have before. Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is a masterful concept album, loaded with lyrics that alternate between heart-rendingly astute and hilariously bitchy, fantastically arranged instrumentation, utterly perfect sequencing and immaculate production, all wrapped up into a package of nervous hyperactivity that's just so much fun to experience. It's one of the year's most unexpected gems, raising the bar for Of Montreal to a totally new level. Kevin Barnes deserves massive kudos for such a brave move, as there was a huge chance that an album as ambitious and overstuffed as this could've been a total disaster. He's shown himself to be an accomplished songwriter and creative force, of whom everyone should be taking note. You can probably see this next bit coming from a mile off, but I'll say it anyway - as of right now, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is, without a doubt, the best album of the year.