Kevin Barnes is done chasing listeners away, at least for the time being. After pruning his fan base with a run of increasingly fussy, exhausting records, lately the capricious Of Montreal frontman has been attempting to widen the tent again. 2013’s Lousy with Sylvianbriar was the band’s most inviting effort since their 2007 consensus high watermark Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, and with its grimy ’70s rock aesthetic and openhearted account of Barnes’ divorce, 2015’s Aureate Gloom was as direct as anything he’d done in a decade. It seems that when Barnes’ personal relationships are in shambles he compensates in the studio by dialing back some of his more alienating impulses, and apparently he’s still reeling from his divorce, because even more so than the last two, the band’s 14th record Innocence Reaches craves approval.
Like most Of Montreal LPs, Innocence Reaches arrives with a hook: It’s the band’s first to dip its toe in contemporary EDM. With its springy, raved-up synths and Calvin Harris tempos, opener “Let’s Relate” teases a spectacular reinvention, while Barnes nods to shifting gender norms with a distinctly 21st century pickup line: “How do you identify?” Challenging gender binaries is nothing new for Barnes, who was prancing around stages in pantyhose back in the mid-’00s, when indie-rock was at its most heteronormative, but the pulsing production seems to invigorate him. He draws out syllables just to savor the moment. Even during his Georgie Fruit phase he rarely sounded quite this liberated.
The electronic makeover is such a flattering look for the band that it’s a shame Barnes didn’t run with it. Though contemporary sounds dot the record, especially the bottom-heavy splatter of “A Sport and a Pastime” and “Trashed Exes,” both of which play like remixes of themselves, Barnes mostly defaults to his go-to muses, Prince and David Bowie, filtering them through his usual prism of funhouse psychedelia. It’s not that any of it misses its mark. “Chaos Arpeggiating” rides a frisky, seriously hummable Ziggy Stardust riff, but we’ve heard Barnes do this kind of thing so many times before, and it sounds that much staler because it follows something we haven’t.
And after a pair of encouraging bounce-back records, Barnes has begun to fall back on some bad habits. Lousy with Sylvianbriar and Aureate Gloom were each recorded with a full band, and Gloom in particular fed on that live energy. The same band is credited on Innocence Reaches, too, but they aren’t nearly the presence here—it sure sounds like Barnes recorded most of it alone, with the same tinker-and-paste ProTools approach that made Paralytic Stalks such a slog. As outgoing as the record tries to be (and it really, really tries), it can’t shake that particular sense of claustrophobia endemic to any full-length where the singer insists on doing his own backing vocals.
That’s one lesson Barnes never learned from Prince or Bowie, both artists who, for all their leading-man charisma, understood the value of collaboration. Each assembled ace bands and made records that felt like group efforts, yet Barnes’ approach is far more rigid. His albums are very much the work and vision of one man, and so even on a relatively easygoing outing like Innocence Reaches, that insularity can grow stifling. It’s as if since Barnes can’t escape his own head, he won’t allow listeners to, either.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misinterpreted a lyric from the song “Let’s Relate;” it has been amended.
