Heart of Darkness
Of Montreal’s latest record is their most direct and autobiographical
by Chris Parker
Of Montreal mastermind Kevin Barnes has recorded at least 15 albums worth of music in the past decade, proving as prolific and melodically gifted as Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard. Whether under the influence of ’60s psyche folk, chamber pop or the lush, heavily rhythmic pop of his most recent albums, Barnes’ output has been universally hailed.
His latest, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, could be his best. It’s the most harrowingly direct autobiographical album since the Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree. Barnes relates his battle with crippling depression that nearly broke up his marriage.
The lyrics are startlingly straightforward. “Gronlandic Edit” opens with Barnes’ confession, “I am satisfied / Hiding in my friend’s apartment / Only leaving once a day to buy some groceries.” The huge orchestrated synth swirls of “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” rival E.L.O., anchored to Barnes’ plea for his brain chemicals to come back in balance: “Come on mood shift / Shift back to good again / Come on, be a friend.” On the chiming, dance-punkish “She’s a Rejector,” he notes, “There’s the girl that left me bitter / Want to pay some other girl to just walk up to her and hit her.”
“Everyone goes through [depression], but I had never experienced anything like it,” Barnes says, speaking from a tour stop in Lawrence, Kan. “It had a pretty strong impact on my life.”
The genesis of Barnes’ problems came when he moved with his wife and bandmate, Nina, to her home in Oslo, Norway. The two met—according to the 12-minute track “The Past is a Grotesque Animal”—when they began discussing French thinker Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye at a Swedish pop festival. At end of 2004, with Nina expecting their first child, they left for Norway, where the couple could take advantage of the national health care system. Barnes’ mood blackened there.
“It’s pretty tough in the winter because there’s very little sunlight, and it’s a pretty big culture shock for someone coming from the U.S. Then there’s all the circumstantial stuff that was going on in my life, which contributed to it as well. So I can’t blame it all on Norway, but I’m sure it had something to do with it,” Barnes says.
After their daughter Alabee was born, the three of them moved back to Barnes’ Athens, Ga. home. He left on tour to support his 2005 release, The Sunlandic Twins, while she stayed home with the baby. But things did not improve for Barnes, and the couple separated. Falling into an even deeper hole, he finally decided to try mood elevators.
“I was really afraid of getting on antidepressants, because I thought it would turn me into something of a zombie, a person with no highs or lows,” Barnes says. “I wouldn’t have even considered getting on antidepressants if I didn’t really feel like it was really my last hope because I was so messed up. I was so suicidal and it just wasn’t happening anymore. If anti-depressants hadn’t worked for me, I would probably be dead right now.”
After a couple months on medication, the dark curtain began to lift: Barnes’ anxiety and paranoia receded. The couple patched things up, and Hissing Fauna received a modest overhaul.
“The record would’ve been pretty somber and ended on an unhappy note, but because my life had taken a more positive turn, I thought I’d restructure it and remove some of the really sad songs and replace them with these newer songs,” Barnes says. “So yeah, it could have been a lot darker.”
Though the theme is largely one of vexation and frustration, the music is infectiously upbeat, particularly during the album’s first half. Opener “Suffer for Fashion” launches with a spring-loaded new wave bounce, while “Sink the Seine” floats effortlessly over a droning synth whose circus melody and tone suggests the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s. Barnes says the pop tone of these songs reflects his attempts to uproot his melancholia musically.
“Music has always been a mirror for my life,” Barnes says. “I wanted it to lift me out of this place, and I knew writing dark, melancholy stuff wasn’t going to help me.”
As the album moves along, a different flavor emerges. Deeper tracks reveal more soul and funk elements. The disco-inflected dance-pop of “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger,” the spacey shuffle of “Labyrinthian Pomp,” and the funky “Faberge Falls for Shuggie” reflect a fascination that’s been supplanting Barnes’ predilection for ’60s and ’70s pop the last few albums.
“To some degree I rediscovered black music—soul music, Jamaican dub and afrobeat,” Barnes says. “It’s getting back into Sly & the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes, the Ohio Players, Curtis Mayfield—all these great songwriters and performers—and incorporating that into this sort of electronic influence, getting into dance stuff with programmed drums, funky bass lines and weird acrobatic vocal parts.”
Barnes recorded most, if not all, of the parts for the last three albums. He enjoys the freedom working on his own affords him, and lately, he’s used it to explore odd song structures.
“I go through phases of wanting to write the perfect pop song and then phases of wanting to write really fragmented slightly more avant-garde and interesting stuff,” Barnes says. “I’m just kind of experimenting with piecing different things together…. You definitely want it to have a visceral quality that everyone can identify with pretty quickly. That’s a talent, to be able to create something that is artistically satisfying and interesting, but also has an immediacy to it.”
The true-to-life nature of Hissing Fauna’s lyrics certainly add poignancy, if not immediacy. But while he’s reconciled with his wife, and the new album has received positive reviews, Barnes doesn’t want to call it a happy ending. “For one thing, it’s not an ending,” he says. Yet the mere fact that he’s here to sing these songs invests them with resilient hope—what better finish can you have than that?
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