The breakup album is a familiar pop music trope-- countless artists have harnessed the emotional fallout of a relationship to fuel their songwriting efforts. The less imaginative practitioners wind up churning out acoustic self-pity or overdriven spite and angst, while the most effective have draped heartbreak in a clever disguise (like the high-gloss domestic dispute of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours), or rendered personal pain as the most important event in human history (like the symphonic catharsis of ABC's The Lexicon of Love).
Despite a soft spot for concept albums, Of Montreal would seem an unlikely participant in this arena, having spent much of their career eschewing confessional introspection for escapist fantasy. Even amidst the notebook-doodle psychedelia society of Elephant 6, Kevin Barnes and his compatriots stood apart for their day-glo Nickelodeon world, full of bizarre characters with alliterative names and toy-box, sugar-high arrangements. While there's always been a dark streak running through Of Montreal's cartoon universe-- and Barnes' chipmunk-shrill voice sometimes tips disturbingly from childlike to desperate-- few would look to the Athens, Geo., band to accurately depict love's gory aftermath.
Yet in the past year, storm clouds have intruded upon the band's rainbow domain as Barnes went through a separation (he and his wife have since reconciled); concurrently, the band's sound has been slowly molting off the giddy pop of its early days, using its past couple of albums to test the waters of a more sinister combination of synth-pop and glam without abandoning its steakhouse jingle-worthy melodies. These two plot threads intertwine at Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, an astonishingly good late-period record from Of Montreal that's as uncomfortably savage in its depiction of breakup psychology as it is relentlessly catchy.
The emotional accuracy of the record lies in Of Montreal's unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to settle for "woe is me" moping. Barnes resists the urge to cry into an acoustic guitar, instead portraying the full-spectrum manic mood-swings of the brokenhearted: desperately seeking distraction in drugs or religion, imagining himself as a cynical-minded lothario, and even considering violence. When Barnes does directly give in to his despair, it produces the monolithic 12-minute centerpiece of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", a gutwrenching soundtrack provided by an unrelenting bassline and a synth solo that sounds like an angry flying saucer.
The rest of Hissing Fauna is an endless supply of off-kilter but instantly appealing melodies intact over the band's newly robotic sound. The focus throughout is on mechanized rhythms and synthesizer swirls, though the tempos are no less hyperactive, and the attention span of the arrangements is only a shade longer. Occasionally, the bright synthesizers appear to mock Barnes' shadowy feelings, like the roller-skate organ riff that flits about the pleading drug-use of "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse", or the Christmas carol exterior of depression saga "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger".
Of Montreal's full embrace of this new sound works best in the record's second half, as after the soul-purge of "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", Barnes tries to slut away the pain through a series of sex jams no less memorable for being completely unconvincing. "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" finds the singer sauntering through the club brushing off sexual advances from both women and men and boasting of "soul power," while "Faberge Falls for Shuggie" struts over a bassline funkier than I ever could have imagined the group capable of producing. Throughout, Barnes multi-tracks several lascivious voices, making bizarre double entendres out of parachutes and interiors. It's not the direction many of their fans might've imagined they'd take, but it's that very attribute that makes it so ceaselessly fascinating and inexhaustibly replayable.
