Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna

Of Montreal
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Polyvinyl

After a bizarre year in which one of his tunes was headscratchingly rewritten as the Outback Steakhouse jingle, Kevin Barnes is wasting little time re-establishing his indie stalwart status in 2007.

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is Barnes’ eighth-- and by no means the most ridiculously named-- album under the Of Montreal banner. Like its immediate predecessors, 2004’s Satanic Panic In the Attic and 2005’s The Sunlandic Twins, it finds its author working from a danceable, Brian Eno meets The Beatles sort of template--injecting just the right doses of synth riffs and funk rhythms into a dozen sunny but mischievous pop songs.

“Chemicals” is one of the new year’s catchier tracks, sounding a bit like a keyboard based mash-up of The New Pornographers, Fiery Furnaces, and Shins, in their most enjoyable states respectively. “Guess It Would Be Nice,” meanwhile, carries over the funkdified New Wave bass line that eventually made a steak-selling theme song out of The Sunlandic Twins tune, “Wraith Pinned To the Mist & Other Games.”

Amidst all the fun and imminent hipster dance parties, however, it’s easy to overlook some of Hissing Fauna’s darker undertones, most notably Barnes’ increasingly expressive, sometimes downright bitter lyrics. “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” serves up an intriguing, eleven minute frustration-a-thon, while the feisty “She’s a Rejector” finds the normally playful Barnes seething just a tad. “There’s the girl that left me bitter / Want to pay some other girl to just walk up to her and hit her!” Dig it.

(Andrew Clayman)


Published in The Knoxville Voice, January 2007