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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.
Recorded as a one-man operation in a tiny Norwegian bedroom and an attic in Athens GA, the latest of Montreal album, Hissing Fauna, 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.
"I was 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."
"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." But not all of 2005 was bad. After several darker months, Kevin and Nina repaired their relationship and the family was reunited. From then on, things start to look up.
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."
At the time, Satanic Panic In The Attic was of Montreal's most successful album. And after it came Sunlandic Twins, of Montreal's most successful album to date (again).
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. "Aldhils 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.
