The two records couldn’t sound more different, but in some ways Of Montreal’s 13th album Aureate Gloom resembles the band’s peak, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Both showcase Kevin Barnes’ singular talent for unspooling his emotions and wrapping them around narcotic musical fantasias, and both feature a woman named Nina. Eight years ago on Hissing Fauna, Nina Aimee Grøttland, aka Nina Twin, was Barnes’ newly reconciled wife as he struggled with an imbalance of brain chemicals, drugs, and love. Eight years later, Barnes and Grøttland have separated, and now he wonders if perhaps the natural order of the world is imbalance.
Hearing Barnes sing about Grøttland—somehow a part of every Of Montreal album, lyrically or otherwise, since *Satanic Panic in the Attic**—*anchors Aureate Gloom in reality. On Fauna, Barnes strangled his heart inside of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", an opus about his strained relationship with Grøttland. Now Barnes tempers his feelings with melancholy, and instead of some catastrophic metaphor, we get, simply: "You never did me wrong, we just been together too long, babe."
Which is to say, while there's still plenty of Barnesian lyrical rhapsodies here, there's also a refreshing ease, helped in part by the backing group he's been using since 2013’s lousy with sylvianbriar. No longer a dusty, paisley San Francisco band, they’ve become '70s New York art punks. This is thoroughly an electric guitar album, and references to Talking Heads and Television abound (the guitar riff on the verse of "Last Rites at the Jane Motel" is a direct homage to "Marquee Moon"). Set against this wiry, mid-gain pastiche, Barnes' voice adopts a glittery, damaged glam rock tone that falls right in with the musical palette.
This consonance, coupled with Barnes' starkly personal lyrics, make this album one of the least inscrutable in their catalog. Aureate Gloom feels like it belongs in our universe, not some spartan funk galaxy borne out of the recesses of Barnes' mind. "I’m grieving for you, my love" he sings, so innocently, on "Virgilian Lots" before adding, "And I don't understand what's going on." It is straight up shocking to hear Barnes at a loss for words. Of course, just after his bemusement, he falls back on psycho-Marc Bolan patter on "Monolithic Egress". In a series of admissions and realizations (including what sounds like a specific reference to the dissolution of pet names, "I’m not a different man ‘cause you now call me some fucked up name") Barnes beats his chest around an ever-shifting garage rock template. It jumps from a fried take on Zeppelin’s "Immigrant Song" to a kaleidoscopic, proggy psych dream, and inside-out and back around again.
This bounding, perforated punk sound is enjoyable on its own terms, though you wonder what could’ve been if this band didn’t work so modularly in fits and starts. A highlight, "Empyrean Abattoir", starts with Barnes' hushed singing, slowly building with his signature three-part harmonies, carrying the song fluidly until we get to the skittering 5/4 section and Barnes' emotions get the best of him. He sings, now with more distortion on his mic, "Now it’s just a system of subtraction." Which, yes, breaking up is just a system of subtraction, but it’s not exactly a graceful turn of phrase. For every disarmingly honest moment, in other words, there is an equal and opposite moment where Barnes obfuscates, to unclear ends. These sudden shifts make it fun to follow Kevin Barnes, but difficult to get close to Kevin Barnes.
Of Montreal's concept has migrated as erratically as the tempo shifts and time changes on Aureate Gloom, so much that it’s hard to find their natural center now. So, our attention spans drift away. By the time the chaos of the bitter closer "Like Ashoka’s Inferno of Memory" comes on like an overcooked Bowie tribute, it’s hard to feel connected to the soul of this group. Even though Barnes is trying so desperately to figure out what’s happening in front of him, it’s a barbed mess behind him. Ultimately the music becomes another mask, another thing Barnes is trying to untangle, in a great chapter in the lengthy, wonderfully ornate Of Montreal compendium. That’s the paradox with Of Montreal: the more they create, the less you know them.
