Did you hear the one about how reality is an illusion and what we think of as “human life” and “the universe” are just lines of code in some superior being’s cosmic computer simulation? Although it has the ring of stoner mysticism, simulated reality is an actual theory that scientists and philosophers have seriously entertained. At a debate on the subject a couple of years ago, moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson confessed, “It is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” The theory gained currency, for obvious reasons, after Brexit, the 2016 election, and the odd best picture mix-up at last year’s Oscars.
It also made quite the impression on Of Montreal mastermind Kevin Barnes, who cites months of Trump-related “simulated reality paranoid” as a chief influence on his new album, White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood. On the chorus of the best track, “Plateau Phase/No Careerism No Corruption,” he suggests that what we think of as reality is so fragile and fluid that, “If we put our ear to the ceiling, we can hear the multiverse seeding, we can hear the simulation wheezing.”
Not that Barnes—a maximalist in all things, from songwriting to character creation to performance style—could ever confine himself to a single inspiration. For more than a decade, he’s been documenting his emotional crises on Of Montreal albums that double as catalogs of his recent obsessions. Along with referencing Germaine Greer, James Salter, and classic European art films like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Barnes increasingly conceives each LP as a genre study. False Priest, from 2010, was his Prince-inspired foray into plastic funk. His most recent album, 2016’s Innocence Reaches, filtered contemporary EDM sounds and internet/social justice jargon through vintage synthesizers. Now, each almost-yearly release plays like a new season of an ongoing Kevin Barnes anthology series; the styles, characters, and themes change, but the auteurist creator and his intellectual voracity remain the same.
With White Is Relic, Danceteria season approaches. Barnes includes a list of influences that features ’80s-era extended club mixes, the late chopped-and-screwed pioneer DJ Screw, and the colorful gender fuckery of films by Pedro Almodóvar. On a personal level, Barnes says he’s finally forgiven himself for the failure of his well-documented marriage to former bandmate Nina Aimee Grøttland and fallen in love again. But it’s simulated reality that makes these apparently unrelated sounds and ideas hang together, in one of the most cohesive Of Montreal albums since their 2007 masterpiece, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
It’s to Barnes’ credit that, despite his experimentation, every song he records has his stamp—those churning melodies, the faintly androgynous vocals, the comically vast lyrical vocabulary. Still, White Is Relic goes a step beyond even his recent genre studies, stretching the typical four-minute Of Montreal single so that only six tracks fill its 41-minute runtime. Punctuated by fluttery horns and synths that recall zippers on nylon, the long instrumental passages really do give the impression that Barnes has remixed his own compositions.
Cribbing from DJ Screw, Barnes often slows down just one element of a song, creating the spooky sensation that it’s playing in two different dimensions at once. In the outro to “Paranoiac Intervals/Body Dysmorphia,” his vocals are pulled thin like taffy over increasingly arpeggiated drum beats. “Body dysmorphia, I know how it feels,” he chants, as the music translates that perceptual distortion into aural terms. The overall impression is of some outside force—perhaps an alien species with next-level programming skills and a sick sense of humor—adjusting each track as it plays. In fact, Barnes did compose the album as a sort of disembodied intelligence, incorporating the contributions of remote collaborators instead of gathering a band in the studio.
If Kevin Barnes the songwriter is playing god, then Kevin Barnes the singer is all too human, a digital ant like everyone else desperate to stay sane in this darkest computer-simulated timeline. Love is one source of transcendence. It gives us a glimpse of the dirty-minded, late-’00s Of Montreal on “Sophie Calle Private Game/Every Person Is a Pussy, Every Pussy Is a Star!,” a mid-tempo sex jam that name-drops Sappho and recounts all-night Almodóvar binges, alongside erotically asphyxiated saxophones.
Like so many of us fragile aesthetes, Barnes has spent the past two years looking to political art for inspiration to resist America’s new dystopian regime. That’s where he channels the work of Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin, as well as the words “white is relic,” for better and worse. On the ghostly “Writing the Circles/Orgone Tropics,” the compulsively self-dramatizing singer seems to be chiding himself with the observation, “This acute loneliness that you feel has nothing to do with other people.” But even if your tolerance for white artists discovering racism two decades into their career is high, it’s sure to be tested by some of Barnes’ more self-indulgent lyrics. The dreamy opening track “Soft Music/Juno Portraits of the Jovian Sky” finds him complaining, “Soft music drains the oxygen from besieged Bushwick streets reflexively retching Anglo influx” and resolving that “there will be no gentrificating our graffitied warship of summer love.”
It’s easy to miss the album’s sonic and conceptual ingenuity amid the lyrical bloat. The thing is, even Barnes’ worst clunkers serve a purpose. When they give way to one of the devastatingly plainspoken lines he’s also capable of writing—“It’s good for us depressives to keep someone else alive” on “Sophie Calle,” for example—it’s like he’s lifting a curtain to reveal a shaft of midday sunlight. Whether that blackout shade is Kevin Barnes’ tortured psyche, America in 2018, or our entire, allegedly simulated universe, everything is briefly, brilliantly illuminated when White Is Relic pulls it back.
