Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? is a gamble. The Athens-based band and mouthpiece of Kevin Barnes had spent 10 years worshipping at the altar of Brian Wilson via sunny tunes that meandered through childish themes and inhabited the headspace of fully fictional characters. As the group’s frontman, Barnes had spent tons of energy his previous albums erecting fanciful walls between the music he was creating and his own life, choosing to construct hyper-literate stories about twee people living obsessively cute lives. Those walls gradually eroded along with his beloved ’60s pop sound, as Barnes began to experiment more and more with electronic textures. When they finally came crashing down to the sound of distorted synthesizers on Fauna, it revealed that the clinically depressed life Barnes was living was anything but precious.
There was no guarantee that Of Monreal’s dedicated fanbase would follow Barnes as he made the leap from cutesy, vaudevillian songsmith to chronicler of Scandinavian seasonal affective disorders. But looking back on the band’s legacy today, it’s clear that Barnes’ bold move paid off. The swirling, pristine funk of Fauna — which turns 10 today — has far surpassed those infantile early tracks to become the sound that Of Montreal is known for.
Leaving those sweet melodies behind had to take quite a bit of effort, because Barnes was essentially turning his back on the Athens-based Elephant 6 collective that Of Montreal was a part of — he had come up in alongside similarly retro groups like Apples In Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel. Hissing Fauna is about as far from that as an album can get, with very few pieces that sound like they came from anything other than the guts of a computer. Where E6 specialized in tunes that could easily be strummed around a campfire, this album’s opening blast “Suffer For Fashion” makes it clear that it’s a record that can only be recreated via DAWs and elaborate stage rigs. There’s guitars in there, but they’re buried under theremins, drum machines and the sampled cooing of his infant daughter. While Barnes never lost his nose for catchy choruses, he ditched every other hallmark of the band’s sound in the process of making an album that remains the band’s best.
Considering the mental state Barnes was in when he made the record, it’s easy to see why he felt he needed to make a clean break via a messy, emotional album. The frontman has suffered from depressive spirals throughout his entire adult life. Barnes has said that the episodes of depression filled him with a “mad energy” that helped him work through “terrible emotional times.” Hissing Fauna is the first time that he was able to turn the problem into a therapeutic muddle of tracks that address the issues head-on.
On songs like “A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger,” Barnes lays it out plain: “I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway,” he starts. “I felt the darkness of the black metal bands.” Armed with a new regimen of anti-depressants, however, Barnes fights back with the song exploding into a exuberant and manic chorus driven by the sound of amateurish xylophones.
He doesn’t always win. Barnes makes it clear that the fight is never-ending when the album crashes back down into songs like “Cato As A Pun”, a song that describes isolating oneself from all friends and family over rising and falling synth washes that sound like an abandoned beach in winter.
The album is full of an overriding sense of imbalance being forced back into alignment, and in spite of the fact that it includes some of the most saccharine arrangements of Barnes career, he’s not sugarcoating. Chemically-induced contentedness comes with its downsides and the slower songs on the album make this clear. Where previous standout tracks from the band like “Don’t Ask Me To Explain” and “Jennifer Louise” were airy, friendly and shaggy, aping a jam band on a lawn, parts of Fauna are claustrophobic and inhumanly tight. There’s not a single sound out of place on the ode to hermetic urbanites. Where those early songs sounded like a party, when the vocal harmonies come in, it’s very clear that Barnes is singing along with himself. We’re listening to a man trading joyous highs to avoid the awful lows, and the Barnes-on-Barnes vocal layers come across like someone arguing with himself about whether that’s the right decision.
That doesn’t mean that Fauna is overly serious or comes across as a slog. This album a slab of pulsating synths held together with a viscous glop of earworm-y hooks. It’s big and loud and blown-out and depressed. Manic freak outs like “Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse” and “A Sentence of Sorts In Kongsvinger” are chipper to the point of being unsettling to those who want to listen, but they are also ass-shakers. Fauna‘s got a chemical imbalance and you can dance to it.
Barnes was going through a major shift in his life and the resulting album sounds like a band in transition. Fauna would still sound like that, a shift into something new and exciting, even if there wasn’t a 12-minute epic in the center of the album wherein the lead singer morphs and assumes the identity of a middle-aged black transvestite. The character of Georgie Fruit who appears in the midst of “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal” might not fly in 2017 — even if Barnes was attempting to ape gender-fluid glam rock heroes like David Bowie — but in the midst of an album attempting to overcome his crippling depression, you’re willing to sympathize with anything that will get Kevin through the day.
If that didn’t make it obvious, Fauna is also the album on which Barnes truly started to let his freak flag fly. And this carried over into the band’s now legendary live shows. The new, chemically improved Barnes was bursting at the seams with new ideas including skits that seemed pulled straight out of the mind of an acid-damaged theater director. Suddenly, Barnes was sharing the stage with grotesque and odd scenes like with a family gassing one of their children on Christmas, attempted crucifixions and boxing matches between anatomically correct poodle-women.
A trip to any Of Montreal show even a decade later will leave you in a dark room, surrounded by people who are torn between dancing and watching the set pieces. You might want to move, but it’s hard when Barnes comes out in a 10-foot-tall bird costume whose white wings double as projection screens for skin-crawling animations that look like a cross between Liquid Television and Sick Sad World.
And listening to Fauna, these on-state nightmares seem to fit somehow. The album oscillates between the drone-y club exploration of “Bunny Ain’t No Kind Of Rider” and anarchist playground chants like “Labyrinthian Pomp.” After listening to an album that’s weird enough to contain this different moods, a concert that is introduced by a man playing the actual devil seems not only acceptable but appropriate.
This overbearing weirdness has hung around the band, hooking me on their live show even as Barnes returned to the sound and themes of Fauna (in the guise of the aforementioned and still offensive Fruit, of course) for two more albums and an EP: 2008’s Skeletal Lamping, 2010’s False Priest and 2011’s thecontrollersphere. Their strange stage show keeps me coming back to their live sets even as the later albums have provided diminishing returns. In the light of this album, it makes sense to continue returning to see a band whose albums you haven’t liked in a decade.
With Barnes diving further and further into the alter-ego of Georgie Fruit, it almost seems like the walls of his early albums of character sketches are back up. We’re hearing the stories of yet another fanciful fiction dreamed up by Barnes, spread thinner and thinner over the course of several albums. But that brief glimpse into the real Barnes on Fauna remains his greatest moment, and it’s more than worth waiting out a bunch of unfamiliar songs for the joyous encore that still gives Fauna pride of place.
