It's impossible to investigate
Paralytic Stalks,
Of Montreal's obtuse 11th album, without looking at the band's pinnacle: 2007's
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? That record broke out in multicolored bursts of intensely catchy pop songs that skittered frantically from disco beats to 12-minute Krautrock-rhythmed vamps, all backdropping
Kevin Barnes' high-pitched tales of chemical imbalance and mental breakdown. Even from the band's earlier days of bedroom twee,
Of Montreal had been doing a slightly different morph of
Barnes' audacious pop personality since the very beginning.
Hissing Fauna, however, was the first time any of these weird angles worked in a way that a wider audience could connect with. That perfect storm has been difficult to re-create in subsequent albums. Released in 2008,
Skeletal Lamping was a confused mess of a concept album, and 2010's
False Priest found
Barnes shooting for a modern R&B take on psychedelic pop, complete with cameos by bona fide soul divas Solange Knowles and
Janelle Monáe. On
Paralytic Stalks,
Of Montreal approach almost prog levels of splintered psych-pop composition. Lead-off single "Dour Percentage" is the most crystallized moment of the swirling components that run more amok on the rest of the album. Understated woodwinds and translucent Mellotron hooks wrap around funky pop choruses. The
Bowie worship that began on
False Priest escalates here, and the reference point actually works nicely to ground some of
Barnes' psycho-sci-fi concept lyrics. The midnight funk guitar stabs of "Ye, Renew the Plaintiff" meld a "Fame"-era
Bowie influence with blown-out glitchy beats. This album also marks the first time
Barnes has brought in session musicians to augment his usually isolated, meticulous studio creations. This is a strange dichotomy, in that
Paralytic Stalks is lyrically the most personally naked
Of Montreal record to date. The band has been growing more confessional since
Hissing Fauna, but themes of revenge, bitterness, and absolute emotional bankruptcy repeat like a one-sided conversation throughout the record. It's disquieting how genuinely messed up the characters in
Barnes' songs come across at times. The bipolarity of the lyrics spills over into the music in the more unhinged moments of the album. "Exorcism Breeding Knife" sprawls into musique concrète territory with tape manipulation and a collision of industrial and classical instrumentation scoring
Barnes' multi-tracked mutterings. Album closer "Authentic Pyrrhic Remission" goes on twice as long, a rambling song cycle of distorted electro art pop, eventually melting into discordant strings and then a brief piano rumination. The album ends feeling unfinished, or more like
Barnes has just thrown out a million beginnings, purposefully omitting all resolution. In the end,
Paralytic Stalks is simply the next logical step in
Of Montreal's evolution. As
Barnes' shattered look at pop music becomes as complex as his look at the human psyche, his songs become more fragmented and drift further away from anything resembling traditional forms.
Of Montreal grow less accessible with
Paralytic Stalks, but it's respectable how unconcerned
Barnes seems with anything besides staying true to his freakily fractured vision. ~ Fred Thomas