Fickle sadists that we are, we want our artists to lay their suffering out for us without being, you know, too emo-obvious about it. So even though Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? leads off with the thesis statement "we just want to emote 'til we're dead," we find ourselves too distracted by the shiny synthesizer baubles and merrily chugging machine rhythms to immediately pick up on the record's gloomy words and themes. By the time we realize the record is an auditory record-keeping of Kevin Barnes' marital and psychiatric struggles, the hooks are already sunk and we're singing along to his pain and agony, and feeling really good and terrible about it.
You'd think that trick wouldn't work again, that the bite-size format of Hissing Fauna's sister EP, Icons Abstract Thee, would be an easier and happier pill to swallow. Wrong. Rather than cobbling together the chaff from Hissing Fauna, it's more like a condensed version-- the Reader's Digest summary of its parent album's themes and sound. In this highly concentrated form, Kevin Barnes' romantic anguish is even more difficult to voyeurize. Bearing in mind that the record is only 20 minutes long, there's a disturbingly high proportion of dear-diary lyrics dripping with self-loathing and anger:
"I never ever wanted to write this song/ I always thought things would change somehow/ And we would start getting along/ But it's hopelesssss" (italics for multi-Barnes overdub emphasis)
Yikes. But like Hissing Fauna before it, Barnes' bitter self-reflection is largely surrounded by a candied sugar shell, the same techno-updated hyper-pop the group is known for. Opening track "Du Og Meg", in fact, is probably closer to Of Montreal's early sound than anything on Hissing Fauna; its sunny guitar riffs and horn-section breakdown are vintage Elephant 6, and only the drum programming dispels the throwback illusion. A fairytale retelling of Barnes meeting his wife abroad, bringing her on tour to hock merch, and eventually proposing, the song's innocence also recalls the group's more romantic days, songs in love with love like Coquelicot's gorgeous "It's Just So".
But this moment of fleeting happiness is just a cruel setup by narrator Barnes, and the rest of the EP is a headlong descent into DSM-IV depression. "Voltaic Crusher" is a peppy number more in line with the band's current synth-pop leanings, a busy rhythm track underscoring a melody competition between bass, guitar, and keyboards as Barnes pleads with God to send his wife a better man than him. "Derailments in a Place of Our Own" and "Miss Blonde Your Papa Is Failing" come closer to the sad-sack approach the band has astutely avoided, both largely solo acoustic tracks lacking the giddy complexity of the Hissing Fauna material, the arrangements trading gleeful escapism for seething anger and fragile honesty.
These stripped-down tracks are just a mellow calm before the climactic storm of "No Conclusion", the most ambitious and breathtaking portion of Barnes' pop opera of depression and despair. Consisting of roughly five songs sutured together Fiery Furnaces-style, "No Conclusion" is among the most complexly catchy contemplations of suicide ever committed to tape. Here, Barnes doesn't attempt to even flimsily cloak his feelings, going so far as to address himself by name within the song ("Don't worry, Kevin"), while the music hops maniacally from idea to idea behind him. The track is filled with meta-moments, most blatantly the two instances when Barnes mentions "repeating" before a multi-track loop is triggered; a clever joke, until the sad realization that there's not even a band present to share his pain, just a computer running Reason. By the end, Barnes reaches his most desperate point (see #9 above) and loops it relentlessly like self-flagellation...until a mournful string section echoing the chord progression gently ushers him off-stage.
Those 10 minutes of music make Icons, Abstract Thee worthwhile all by themselves; after all, it is half the EP's running time, and will likely end up as one of 2007's finest musical accomplishments. It's a worthy final sequence to the saga that Hissing Fauna and Icons, Abstract Thee comprise, bravely integrating real-world emotion into Of Montreal's cartoonishly sugar-high sound while the band finishes its metamorphosis into a more electronics-based state. It's enough of an achievement that we can forgive being seduced by Barnes' pop talents into dancing to his anguish; let's just hope he has happier experiences to report on next time around.
