Album Reviews

Of Montreal is not from Montreal (they’re from Athen, Georgia) and the “they” on this album from 2004 are Kevin Barnes and lyricist Dan Donahue.

Barnes is kind of a modern day Todd Rundgren, though home multi-track recording makes many of today’s young artists “Todd Rundgren-like” in that sense. Barnes makes sound and music similar to Rundgren’s poppier stuff.Barnes plays most of the instruments (guitars, drums, keyboards, etc.) and sings and he records and mixes as well. Like Rundgren, a one man show.

Barnes is exploding with uptempo pop ideas so he packs as many as he can into as small a musical space as possible, jumping from one idea to another. You could call it “bar hopping.”

Lyrically it’s fun and frivolous and not weighed down by the world. When he’s sad, Barnes jumps with the happiness of just being alive.

In “Rapture Rapes the Muses,” he sings: Gloomy Erebus is an anathema to me/ 
All of them dancing like flames and the sad enmity/ 
I wonder if I understand/
Am I too young to understand?”

Even when he’s melancholy Barnes makes it feel like a walk down Carnaby Street in the 1960s. His “Blackbird” is “City Bird,” in which he wonders why a city bird doesn’t just fly off to the country. I don’t think he’s singing about Angela Davis!

Less weighty than McCartney, poppier than The Shins, not as psychedelic as Apples in Stereo and musically so breezy it threatens to blow away, Barnes/Of Montreal has a cotton candy musical “mouth feel.” If it’s all you eat, you’ll become woefully undernourished or diabetic, but in measured doses, there’s plenty to enjoy, especially if you upload it to your iPod and listen in the car or the gym.

I bought the vinyl to support the medium but sonically it’s a strictly lo-fi recording and not as in “hi-fi” as we know it. This is low fi! But it’s cleanly done and listenable with plenty of cheesy reverb behind Barnes’s voice and a well-organized mix.

In Kevin Barnes’s world, it’s always springtime and colors are all pastel. Even when he and his friends come upon a dead lady at a bus stop there’s levity. That’s not a bad world in which to live. Whenever a bad mood strikes, on comes this album and everything gets better. Nothing wrong with that. You can feel young even if you're not. You just need to be reminded.