When Is Tragedy Ever Petite?

Part I: Kevin Barnes Traveled A Tortuous Path To Create Of Montreal's New Album, Obliterating Arbitrary Walls Along The Way

originally published March 14, 2007

David Lynch's new film Inland Empire weighs in at three hours, and Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day tips the scales at 1,085 pages. Both works fit their skins, though, attaining depths necessary for cartography of their creators' obsessions and ideas, and both succeed, not only as reflections of the contemporary world (as well as worlds above and below), but also as keyholes into the cores of their creators. So it's fitting that "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" anchors the new Of Montreal album Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

It's a sprawling, 12-minute beast of a thing, and unlike any song Kevin Barnes, Of Montreal's main creative force, has created before. Wheezing guitars peel back an opening sonic haze, and a rhythm kicks in that doesn't relent for the duration of the song; layers pile on as everything swirls towards the center. The lyrics focus on Barnes' relationship with his wife Nina - the meeting, the attraction, the unsaids; it's the most intensely personal song on an album of intensely personal songs from a songwriter who, until recently, populated his songs with decidedly apersonal characters. But, according to Barnes, it was his decision to veer towards the confessional and write about an admittedly "insane" time in his life that made Hissing Fauna , released on Polyvinyl Records in January, possible.

Backtrack a bit, first, to the writing of the genre-busting album, a chronological tour through the ups and downs of Barnes' recent life. "It was a totally organic thing. I need ed to do it. And I wasn't even really thinking of making a record or putting it together like you do… a sequence of songs and that sort of thing. I was making music to save myself," says Barnes. We're sitting outdoors at a picnic table at Bishop Park. It's sunny and unseasonably warm, and millions of miles away from Norway, where Barnes was when he wrote and recorded the album entirely on his own (a full band rounds out the live show).

"I started recording when Nina [who is a native Norwegian] and I went to Norway [in 2004], when she was pregnant with [our daughter] Alabee," says Barnes, an Athens native. "We don't have health insurance, so we decided to have the baby over there. Living in Norway, nothing really to do, no friends really, a bit of a culture shock and going through all that. I think that because of the dramatic lifestyle change, I sort of - I hear this happens to a lot of people - went through this really intense depression, which was something I'd never gone through before or been depressed like that before. I mean, I'd been, like, 'My life sucks' or blah blah blah, but it was never a physical thing. It was so strong. It hit me really really really hard. It was almost like being on strong drugs or something. Really upsetting and confusing. It was a really crazy experience, all these anxiety attacks and paranoia and obsessive-compulsiveness, all this bad shit I was going through. It was really difficult to navigate through and even keep my head above water. And that was just the beginning."

"[So] I needed something to focus on that was positive, and music's always been that way for me. Rather than fighting with Nina or fighting with myself or drinking heavily or doing a lot of drugs, that was my way of coping with it. And then when you realize, 'Wait, I'm a recording artist, I put out records, I should put these songs together and make a record,' in a way, it sort of cheapens things to a degree because of marketing strategies and press photos and all that crap, but the record itself is really special to me. Now I'm out of that dark period, feel a lot better and look back and think, 'God, that was an insane year.'"

The track "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse" - with its opening plea of "I'm in a crisis, I need help. Come on, mood, shift, shift back to good again, come on be a friend!" - captures Barnes' spiraling depression and culture shock, but the lyrics overlay an optimistic and soaring synth melody. "Gronlandic Edit" combines funky bass lines with Prince- and Stereolab-esque sounds, though its vocals are nothing but confusion and searching. Kevin says this juxtaposition of energetic sounds and depressed lyrics wasn't just intentional, it was imperative.

"It's interesting," he says, "because the first half of the record is very poppy. That's the thing, I was trying to make music to help myself get out of this dark period, so instead of writing dark and melancholy stuff, which I knew wouldn't help me at all, I tried to sort of uplift my life with sound."

A bad case of culture shock would've been enough, but Barnes' environmental problems were only the beginning. The new family moved back to the insular world of Athens in early 2005, and the stress that came from staying with Kevin's brother David, not having a house of their own and an impending national tour that would take Barnes away from his new wife and daughter split the family up.

"I was about to go on this super-long tour," says Barnes, "and Nina's having to take care of Alabee all by herself, so there's the pressure of that in the back of my mind, y'know, thinking, 'Am I doing the right thing?' This is the way I'm financially supporting us, but Nina has to take care of Alabee by herself, which is totally overwhelming. And so we go on tour and with [the 2005 album] Sunlandic Twins , it exploded a bit. We were playing larger places and selling out places where before we'd only have a couple hundred people, and so that was super exciting, but at the same time, there's the other side where I'm neglecting my wife and neglecting my daughter. So the two sides, I just could not resolve that at all, and so eventually Nina and I split up. This was all during touring for Sunlandic Twins and writing songs for what would be Hissing Fauna .

"So we split up, she went back to Norway. It was a really bad split; we were both devastated and heartbroken, because you have these dreams about true love and having a family and it's supposed to be magical and fulfilling and so perfect. And then it happens and you realize you're still fucked up and life isn't a dream and you still have to struggle. So that was also really eye-opening and kind of helped me - or made me - view the world in a different way… I went through this hedonistic period of heavy drinking and carousing. I could see that this was an empty pursuit. There's no fulfillment in that lifestyle."

Not all of 2005 was bad, after all, which brings us back to "Grotesque Animal," the album's centerpiece. "'The Past is a Grotesque Animal' is the real tension release," says Barnes. "Everything is building up in my life and exploding and falling apart around me. That song was kind of like, 'Let's face it, let's face forward and straight on and get everything out in the open. I fucked up, you fucked up, everything is fucked up.' But what we discover is that when everything falls apart, we're still together with this special connection that is really exceptional. Me and Nina. The song is basically like me talking to her because I couldn't really talk to her because it's so difficult to communicate things to other people. There's so much baggage and weird restrictions you put on yourself - I can't say this because then you will react this way, and I don't want you to react this way - it's a one-sided dialogue."

And after several darker months, the couple repaired their relationship and the family was reunited. From that point of the album on, things start to look up; numerous influences abound on Hissing Fauna , and Barnes brings in some new sounds, particularly on the upbeat second half of the record. With the falsetto vocals and unhinged, swaggering sexuality of tracks like "Faberge Falls For Shuggie" and "Labrinthian Pomp," comparisons to the sexed-up sounds of Prince and Sly Stone are easy to make.

The vamped-up sounds of what was once a much cuter, simpler and easier to categorize pop band should come as no surprise, though; it's a natural evolution and one that Barnes has hinted at in past performances. Take, for instance, the band's Aug. 19, 2006 performance at the 40 Watt. Near the end of the song "Oslo in the Summertime," a crowd favorite off the wildly successful Sunlandic Twins , Barnes replaces his chorus with the hook from the Kelis song "Millionaire," so you've got a twinky, glammed-up Athens pop musician dropping rhymes from a lusciously hyper-sexualized R&B singer's song, written in the first place by Outkast's André 3000 (a man with clear pussy-baiting Prince aspirations of his own). We're leagues away from the Vaudevillian camp of early Of Montreal albums like The Gay Parade.

"I've really been into Sly Stone," says Barnes. "I watched a lot of live performances, and he's such a great performer, y'know, such a freak in the best way… For some reason, it's taken a long time for me just to feel comfortable with who I am. Growing up feeling like a freak, thinking 'shit, I should be different, I should be more like those people.' Everybody feels like they have something different inside them, but sometimes you forget that we're all very similar in that way and you feel that it's the world against me, and that's not really true, you have so much in common with so many people, even the person who's being an asshole to you, that even if you sat down, you could find a connection. But with Sly Stone, it seems like he has matured to this level that I really want to, let his freak flag fly and feel comfortable around anybody."

So it's no mistake that "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" name-checks the quasi-mystic and transgressive French writer Georges Bataille and his 1928 novella Story of the Eye . The story presents a series of orgiastic vignettes, and speaks to debauchery in the face of customary restraint. "Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit," wrote Bataille, "to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison." Dark and light, yin and yang, cats and dogs: oldies but goodies, filling a deep and rewarding well for Of Montreal to plumb.

Barnes' sweaty side has surfaced with the stage persona of Georgie Fruit, a delicious counterpoint to the prim, poised proclamations of past characters like Claude Robert. "Georgie Fruit is a black she-male, just a real freaky character," says Barnes. "I can't really get a finger on how old Georgie is, or what sort of life Georgie's had, but he/she is very sexual and maybe slightly pompous, but in that sort of way of someone who's been through a lot. Georgie's probably been to prison a few times. Georgie's gone from man to woman, changed genders."

Pynchon's Against the Day seems to be about us all. Sure, it's "about" anarchists and assassinations and global spelunking and ballooning, at least when you're talking plot(s), but thematically it touches on the variations, nuances and problems of today. And Inland Empire , well, although it eschews traditional concepts of plot as one event pave-stoned after another, it presents no shortage of theme. Different viewings of the film lead to different interpretations, but at its core, beyond all its stories of actresses, prostitutes and Polish gangsters, it seems to be about the reclamation of self and the establishment of identity. Against the Day looks around and perhaps beyond our globe, Inland Empire dives into multiple layers of character and fiction and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? looks almost exclusively at its author himself, making it slightly less towering and far less surreal than Pynchon and Lynch. Relative to context of Of Montreal's past output, though, it's perhaps just as ambitious. The specific focuses may be different, but the album's statements are also universal, and Barnes' lyrical topics of lust, regret, redemption and bliss - shuttled straight to the dance floor via irresistible pop hooks - are no-brainers to us all. Let's get physical, sure, but intellectual as well - both can be compellingly visceral.

Credit most likely goes to Of Montreal's recent marriage of both pelvis and cranium for taking the band to its current, most popular and successful point in a decade-long career. For more on the band's successes, though, pick up next week's paper.

Chris Hassiotis

Part II of this story looks at Of Montreal's growing international popularity, its increasingly theatrical live performances, and what happens when a band (gasp!) sells its songs to a steakhouse.

WHO: Of Montreal, Loney, Dear
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Saturday, March 24
HOW MUCH: $12