of Montreal 'Hissing Fauna Are You The Destoyer?' album

of Montreal is many things. of Montreal is one of the stalwarts of the Athens, Georgia pop scene. of Montreal is the recording and performing project of one Mr. Kevin Barnes. And of Montreal is one of the many bands still in operation with a tie to the loose Elephant Six collective of the late '90s, a group of like-minded bands centered around that incredibly fertile Southern college town. of Montreal is not , however, predictable. And therein lies the appeal of a band that, over its past two albums with Polyvinyl Records, has exploded from cult appeal to international popularity. With its union of Kinks-inspired, late-'60s rock send-up and '80s-era synth stylings, the 2004 album Satanic Panic in the Attic planted the seeds for a new audience. Last year's dance-inducing, idiosyncratic electro-pop masterpiece Sunlandic Twins cultivated that expanded and ever-enthusiastic audience, letting a growing legion of fans flourish. Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? arrives on January 23, 2007, ready to reap the benefits.

It's an irresistible and remarkable album, sounding like a logical extension of the erratic indie-disco sounds of Sunlandic Twins . Recorded as a one-man operation in a tiny Norwegian bedroom and an attic in Athens GA, the album swings from swaggering guitar to moody synths, from exultant sing-along to curious combinations of sounds. Lyrically, you've got boisterous pomp, maddening depression and decadent indulgence. Hissing Fauna is strange, unexpected, entrancing and rewarding. And if not for the tumultuous year that nearly tore Kevin Barnes apart, it never would have existed.

-This Is Right Now

Hissing Fauna is the most personal of Montreal album to date, with Kevin, currently 32 years old, pouring tremendous amounts of emotion, heartbreak, frustration and elation into its twelve tracks. Written and recorded primarily during what he calls "an insane year," Hissing Fauna saw Kevin adopt a new writing style. It was an unabashedly autobiographical attempt from a songwriter whose early material tended towards characters and story-songs.

"All the songs and lyrics were written as I was going through this dark period, so it wasn't like I was writing them in retrospect," he says. "It was a different process, because in the past I'd write songs on acoustic guitar or piano and I'd have them for months and months before I recorded them. This was the first time I'd ever really recorded the songs as I was writing them." The album found its genesis in Kevin's time spent in Norway around the end of 2004, when his daughter Alabee was born. Kevin and his wife Nina had no health insurance and had decided to relocate temporarily to Nina's hometown of Oslo to take advantage of the health benefits the Norwegian government offers artists.

"Living in Norway, with nothing really to do and no friends really," says Kevin, "it was a bit of a culture shock going through all that. I think that, because of the dramatic lifestyle change, I went through this really intense depression. It was something I'd never gone through before. It wasn't so much a physical thing but it was almost paralyzing. It was so strong. It hit me really, really hard. It was almost like being on strong drugs or something: really upsetting and confusing. It was such a crazy experience, all these anxiety attacks and paranoia and obsessive-compulsiveness, all this bad shit I was going through. It was really difficult to navigate through and even keep my head above water. And that was just the beginning."

The track "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse" -- with its opening plea of "I'm in a crisis, I need help. Come on, mood, shift, shift back to good again, come on be a friend!" -- captures Kevin's spiraling depression and culture shock, but the lyrics overlay an optimistic and soaring synth melody. "Gronlandic Edit" combines funky bass lines with Prince- and Stereolab-esque sounds, though its vocals are nothing but confusion and searching. Kevin says this juxtaposition of energetic sounds and depressed lyrics wasn't just intentional, it was imperative.

"It's interesting," he says, "because the first half of the record is very poppy. That's the thing, I was trying to make music to help myself get out of this dark period, so instead of writing dark and melancholy stuff, which I knew wouldn't help me at all, I tried to sort of uplift my life with sound."

A bad case of culture shock would've been enough, but Kevin's environmental problems were only the beginning. The new family moved back to the insular world of Athens, Georgia, in early 2005, and the stress that came from trying to balance the two worlds of family and art, not having a house of their own and an impending national tour that would take Kevin away from his new wife and daughter split the family up. "They went back to Oslo," says Kevin, "and I went through this hedonistic period of heavy drinking. I could see that this was an empty pursuit, there's no fulfillment in that lifestyle, but I was just trying to forget it all." At the center of Hissing Fauna is the track "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal," a winding, surprising 12-minute auto-bio epic. Kevin says it's the turning point on the album; not all of 2005 was bad, after all, and after several darker months, Kevin and Nina repaired their relationship and the family was reunited. From then on, things start to look up.

Numerous influences abound on Hissing Fauna , and Kevin brings in some new influences, particularly on the upbeat second half of the album. "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" and its almost criminally catchy chorus, spotlights one night at an Athens bar popular with the closing-time crowd. It's a tongue-in-cheek kiss-off to scenesterism. With the falsetto vocals and unhinged, swaggering sexuality of tracks like "Faberge Falls For Shuggie" and "Labyrinthian Pomp," comparisons to the idiosyncratic sounds of Prince are easy to make.

Kevin, however, says he reaches farther back for inspiration. "I've really been into Sly Stone," he says. "I watched a lot of live performances, and he's such a great performer, such a freak in the best way. He's so free, and it doesn't seem like he feels uptight or self conscious. I always really respect that, because a lot of the time I feel self conscious or I lack confidence. For some reason it's taken a long time for me just to feel comfortable with who I am, but with Sly Stone, it seems like he matured to this level that I really want to; he could just let his freak flag fly and feel comfortable around anybody."

More than anything else, Kevin says that, had his life gone differently over the past year, Hissing Fauna would've taken a totally different shape, and that the album's development and identity is intimately related to his own. "It was a totally organic thing. I needed to do it," he says. "And I wasn't even really thinking of making a record or putting it together like you do... sequencing the songs and that sort of thing. I was making music to save myself. I needed something to focus on that was positive, and music's always been that way for me."

-This Is Back Then

At the time, Satanic Panic in the Attic was of Montreal's most successful album, and has sold nearly 23,000 copies to date. And after it came Sunlandic Twins, of Montreal's most successful album to date (again), which had as of this past fall clocked in at 50,000 copies sold.

But before this success, of Montreal spent almost ten years in what Kevin calls the "indie ghetto," garnering slight attention but often dismissed as a second-tier '60s-obsessed Elephant Six band.

After spending a little time playing with the band Elf Power, in 1997 Kevin put together Cherry Peel, the debut of Montreal album released by Bar/None. It was a collaboration with bassist Bryan Poole (The Late B.P. Helium, Elf Power) and drummer Derek Almstead (Circulatory System, 63 Crayons).

Up next was the 1998 album The Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy , in which Kevin recruited drummer Jamey Huggins, guitarist Andy Gonzalez and keyboardist Dottie Alexander. This marked the beginning of a period of character pieces, with Kevin adopting a songwriting style almost akin to the structure of children's stories. It was a style that would fully crystallize on The Gay Parade , the band's ambitious third album.

At the time, it seemed like everyone in the Athens pop scene put in an appearance on the album. The town's bands have always shared members, but 1999's The Gay Parade took it to an absurd level, with members of the bands Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Music Tapes and Elf Power all lending a hand or four. Kevin assumes an alter-ego named Claude Robert, and guides the listener through a whimsical parade of volunteer firefighters, morose grandpas, pathetic pugilists, miniature philosophers and owl translators. The sound was Vaudevillian, and enthusiastically so, as Claude Robert introduced listeners at the album's outset and bade them farewell (but invited them to return) upon its close.

After the release of The Gay Parade and its subsequent tours, of Montreal signed with the now-defunct Athens label Kindercore and the entire crew moved into a house together outside of town to begin work on its 2001 follow-up full-length Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse , a perky pop quilt of gloriously weird proportions.

2002's Aldhils Arboretum saw the group adopt a more collaborative and traditional rock-oriented approach. "Aldhil's was more straightforward," says Kevin, "with everyone writing their own parts and then Derek mixing it." The album wasn't a high point in the band's career, and it seemed to be same old, same old. Something had to give, and for Kevin, it was a push in a more solo-oriented direction. "I got tired of all the conflicts you run into with a collaborative effort," says Kevin, "where sometimes you can get to the point where there's so much compromising from every person on every aspect just to make the record even happen, that no one's really satisfied... I think living together in that house, it became too much, we were all so involved in each other's lives that anything we did affected everyone else. It became almost a Lord of the Flies situation because we were all out in the country totally secluded."

Several of these earlier Of Montreal albums were re-issued by Polyvinyl in 2006, and are currently available. Between the full-length albums, the band also released singles and collections including The Early Four Track Recordings , The Bird Who Continues To Eat The Rabbit's Flower , If He Is Protecting Our Nation Who Will Protect Big Oil, Our Children? and Horse & Elephant Eatery (No Elephants Allowed): The Singles & Songles Album.

-This Is Tomorrow

of Montreal's current touring lineup is the same as it has been for the past year or so, though the band these days is scattered across the globe. Kevin, Nina and Alabee split their time between Athens and Oslo, B.P. and bassist Matt Dawson live in Athens. Dottie, however, is living in Santa Cruz, California, and Jamey's is all the way in Stockholm, Sweden.

They're always willing to get together to put on a good show, though, and are eager to ramp up the theatricality of their indie-pop dance party. "We're definitely going to do something a little more elaborate this time, as far as the stage design goes. We're going to have some video projectors and slide projectors and focus more on the presentation of the visuals. As opposed to just using the house lights at the clubs, we're going to bring someone to do lights and help us set up the stage and do different things during the set so that it's not all static."

Once again, Kevin's brother David Barnes contributes the artwork. "It's always one of the parts of releasing an album I get the most excited about," says Kevin, "seeing what David comes up with. And with this one we wanted to make something unconventional as far as the layout and packaging of it. So for the first time, there are no characters. No animals, no people. It's six circles are expressionistic, each representing a different mood that David experienced while listening to the songs."

The packaging features four leaves branching off the central CD case that fold in on themselves, much in the same way you would pack a moving box if you were out of tape. "We wanted to the art to be reminiscent of a letter because the songs are more confessional and introspective" says Kevin.

Three years in a row, three great albums in a row. And after Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?. Kevin says, "the most important thing to me is my body of work and that in fifty... well, I'm not going to be that old... but in thirty or forty years from now, if I get there, I want a really strange, varied body of work. Cherry Peel doesn't sound anything like Hissing Fauna , which I hope doesn't sound anything like the record I make ten years from now."

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of Montreal - Hissing Fauna Are You The Destoyer?