of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Of Montreal* has a tendency to “leave it all on the track”, as they say. No idea goes unturned, and turned, and turned. With Kevin Barnes’s bountiful ideas for basslines, synth noises, and backup vocals, this can induce overwhelming delirium. The lyrics, however, generally should have been scraped off the track and disposed of somewhere.
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
And you ain’t got no soul power
Oh really? And where can I obtain some of this, this… this “soul power” which is of such value, dear sir?
On Metacritic you can find someone describing Barnes as “one of indie rock’s most gifted songwriters.” Are we seeing the end of writing? Brilliant production is not songwriting, dude.
Of Montreal’s and Why?’s (below) albums show the immediate effect of the home-studioizing of popular music. The real audio engineers with their fancy hats and pretty ears have been whining for years that music would no longer sound awesome, like Prince or Fleetwood Mac, or the Hampton Grease Band for that matter. Well, they were right. Few people can master disciplines as divergent as singing, running audio software, writing songs, and fixing broken electronics. But that’s not the point, really. Most of these new bands simply would not have existed 20 years ago.
* Surely you capitalize uncapitalized names when they begin a sentence, as with any word. Let us try limit ourselves to beginning sentences with these abominable self-imposed cutenesses.
