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By Rudy Klapper, January 18, 2012 10:00 am

Certified indie-pop nutjob Kevin Barnes and his constantly metamorphosing band of Montreal are releasing their eleventh album, Paralytic Stalks, February 7th, although a leaked copy has already found its way onto the web. It’s been a long, wild, occasionally annoying journey with Barnes and company, who rose from the ashes of the Elephant 6 record label and their peculiar brand of conceptual twee into increasingly oddball lyrical journeys and increasingly divergent musical tastes, culminating with Barnes’ role as a fictional transsexual musician named Georgie Fruit. 2010′s False Priest eased up on the weird throttle and got back to what drew me to of Montreal in the first place, namely Barnes’ penchant for melody and an appreciation of genres not normally seen in the indie pop game. Paralytic Stalks is sufficiently bizarre to qualify as another of Montreal release, but is firmly grounded in a colorful pop tradition. “Ye, Renew the Plaintiff” even has a pretty sick guitar solo that rips along before an extended outro takes things to outer space and beyond.

Check out the song if you’re an of Montreal fan and ready to subject yourself to another Kevin Barnes roller-coaster ride. And check out Pitchfork’s interview with the outlandish Barnes below.

Of Montreal – “Ye, Renew the Plaintiff”

http://pitchfork.com/news/43989-of-montreals-kevin-barnes-talks-new-album-cassette-box-set-his-career/

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By Rudy Klapper, September 10, 2010 8:00 am

Of Montreal – False Priest

Polyvinyl 2010

Rating: 7/10

Kevin Barnes frustrates me. After his Elephant 6 also-rans Of Montreal released the archetypal power-pop album (Satanic Panic in the Attic) about seven years too late, Barnes hopped onto the electro bandwagon, had some relationship problems, and devolved further and further into his fictional alter ego, a middle-aged African-American former glam rocker named Georgie Fruit who had undergone multiple sex changes. That was a lot to type, and Of Montreal’s latter years output has been quite a lot to listen to. Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? was rightly applauded as the sort of quasi-operatic electro-pop epic Barnes’ talent has always hinted at, complete with twelve-minute existential crises and fanciful wordplay. But Skeletal Lamping was everything I hated about Hissing Fauna magnified, Barnes’ rampant imagination given a green light to roam by all the critical masturbation, resulting in an album that was in desperate need of an editor, or better yet, a hook of any kind. So now comes Of Montreal’s tenth album, a milestone for any band but even more so from a group that is barely recognizable from their twee Elephant 6 days.

Considering I’ve gotten less and less excited for an Of Montreal release since Sunlandic Twins, I came to False Priest with more or less an open mind and one question: will we be getting crazy transsexual Georgie Fruit with this release, the one who doesn’t know when to shut up, or the relatively more mild-mannered Kevin Barnes, who could write a pop song to stand up with the best of Mangum and Schneider? I was pleasantly surprised to find that False Priest definitely leans towards the band’s earlier days, most noticeable in their decision to return to live instruments and a more organic recording process. Opener “I Feel Ya Strutter” is almost a revelation in this regard, although it’s without doubt a stereotypically Of Montreal-ian song – the drums are crisp and bouncy and the bass bubbly with a hint of funk, all while Barnes’ less-vocodered-than-usual vocals propel a pretty straightforward power-pop delight. There’s no electro gimmick, no crazy shift in tone or style, no Barnes yelping like a castrated maniac. There’s still that faint tinge of weirdness that reminds you this isn’t the Apples in Stereo, like that spoken-word bit in the bridge and typically bizarre lyrics (“I’m in a flight simulator / and I am crashing the birth of any potential memory / hey, I’m still way erect for you”). Right from the get-go, it’s obvious this isn’t going to be another Skeletal Lamping; False Priest is composed of actual individual songs, not a thousand piece cut-and-paste experiment, and the album as a whole is better off for it.

It’s not as if Barnes is entirely abandoning his Fruit persona. Some of False Priest’s best tunes mix in a healthy amount of funky R&B, particularly the blue-eyed soul and fat bass on “Hydra Fancies” and the superb combo of “Sex Karma” and “A Girl Named Hello.” It makes Barnes’ past missteps even more tragic when you hear a song like the effortless booty-shaking of “Girl Named Hello,” where it becomes obvious that a Kevin Barnes with a specified direction and a studio environment that doesn’t encourage endless tinkering is far superior to a Kevin Barnes trying to be the Elephant 6 version of Kevin Shields. And then there’s songs like “Coquet Coquette,” which sounds like a noise-rock outtake from Sunlandic Twins (read: awesome) or the Janelle Monae collaboration on “Enemy Gene,” where Barnes and the R&B superstar combine for the smoothest, most satisfying melody on the album. These songs are good precisely because they don’t try to overstep their bounds or become something they’re not – they follow the melody Barnes sets out for them, and although it’s been a while since he’s been so straightforward, his first-rate songwriting chops rise to the surface quite clearly here.

But it wouldn’t be an Of Montreal record if Barnes didn’t decide to fuck around here or there, and False Priest is as inconsistent as most everything else in the band’s discography. Where Barnes falls, he falls hard: the primarily spoken-word verses of “Our Riotous Defects” are embarrassingly bad; “Godly Intersex” can’t decide whether it wants to be an oddball slow jam or psychedelic pop and instead fades away with nary a lasting hook; and the way Barnes ends the proceedings, with the average “Around The Way” and the completely unnecessary 7-minute wankery of “You Do Mutilate?” is practically criminal.  Don’t get me started on Barnes’ lyrics or predictably eccentric song titles – with lyrics like “you fetishize the archetype” and “when we experiment, I will put down your surrogate,” I’ve long given up trying to understand just what Barnes is getting at. Then again, isn’t that what Of Montreal have always been about? Subverting the Elephant 6 power-pop convention with his own quirkiness and defiantly unique peculiarities, Barnes has always been his own man, although once he finally made it out of the shadows of his contemporaries he got a little bit over his head with the genre/gender bending. With False Priest, Barnes finally seems to be settling into his own skin, cherry picking from his long history and patching it all back together into something that Of Montreal could ride into the new decade. Just no more concept albums, please.

Of Montreal – “Sex Karma”

See larger image False Priest (Audio CD) List Price: $14.98 USD New From: $6.38 In Stock Used from: $5.88 In Stock Release date September 14, 2010.

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By Rudy Klapper, September 8, 2010 8:00 am

I get much more of a Sundlandic Twins vibe than a Hissing Fauna or, worse, Skeletal Lamping feeling from Of Montreal’s new record, which drops next Tuesday. This is definitely for the better – for all their critical acclaim, I couldn’t stand those latter two albums. Here’s to Kevin Barnes not trying so hard to be a African-American transsexual with a penchant for G-funk. Janelle Monae with a sweet guest spot here.

Of Montreal – “Enemy Gene”

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By Rudy Klapper, August 13, 2010 8:00 am

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – Let It Sway

Polyvinyl 2010

Rating: 5/10

What made Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s debut album Broom such a delight was its simple charm and beautifully unassuming melodies. Sure, it was home-recorded in a pointedly lo-fi manner and slightly derivative of bands like the Shins and early Apples in Stereo, but there was something inspiring about these three Missouri kids pulling off some truly gorgeous indie pop with a miniscule budget. It meant the songs had to be good, not fluffed up with studio tricks, and they were. The songs on Pershing were just as solid, no doubt, but a more confident SSLYBY began to lose some of that production innocence and amateur sensibility that colored their debut, seeming instead to be searching desperately for that hit single to put them over the top. Now we finally have The Indie Band Making Good – Death Cab’s Chris Walla behind the boards, a honest-to-God studio to play with, and a summer release date, the perfect time to listen to a band as breezy and lighthearted as SSLYBY generally sound. Unfortunately, what they end up with sounds more like contemporary Weezer than something you might find at the back of your local discount record store, something that was perhaps not groundbreaking but definitely yours.

Too often here SSLYBY sound like someone else’s band, or maybe Chris Walla’s wind-up power-pop toy. Of course, everything sounds good – each song here could be a potential hit single for the band or any other songwriter, and with Walla’s beefed-up production sharpening every cymbal hit and making the guitar chords more pleasant and audible than ever before, it’s a fundamentally flawless indie pop record. It’s just so unexpectedly generic; from the faux-anthem “Banned (By The Man)” to the cringe-inducing lyrics of “In Pairs” to the by the numbers designated single “Sink/Let It Sway,” nothing here leaves much of an imprint. Agreeably shiny guitars? Check. Soothing vocal harmonies? Check. Handclaps? Check.  It’s inoffensive, sometimes fuzzy, other times crisp guitar pop, tunes that are a dime a dozen on any college radio station. Those who haven’t heard the band before will find everything agreeable enough, if a little indistinctive – what was the fuss all about, anyways? Then again, only the lovely, acoustic ballad “Stuart Gets Lost Dans Le Métro” takes a page from the Broom handbook, right down to the opaque name, hushed vocals and delicate melody.

If it wasn’t for that sole offering, Let It Sway might seem the work of an entirely different band, one content to offer up bland sing-a-longs like “All Hail Dracula!” and the truly bad one-two combo of “Animalkind” and “Phantomwise,” songs that lack even a modicum of the above average catchiness that keeps the rest of the record afloat. Occasionally SSLYBY will recapture the magic solely on the strength of their not inconsiderable songwriting chops – “Everlyn” is one of the group’s best love pleas ever (the completely surprising guitar solo is a plus), and bookends “Back in the Saddle” and “Made To Last” are two of the strongest tracks on the record, particularly the latter’s wistful tone, so appropriate as the brightest days of summer begin to fade. It’s a shame, because as SSLYBY have continued to expand their sound the genre that they were a few years late to has already grown past them. James Mercer is off doing things with Danger Mouse; Ben Kweller was indulging in alt-country last go-around; most of the Elephant 6 bands are either off getting freaky with themselves (Of Montreal) or spacing out (Apples in Stereo). If the band doesn’t start catching up to their peers, they’re going to end up a lot more like their misbegotten namesake than they would probably prefer.

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – “Everlyn”

See larger image Let It Sway (Audio CD) List Price: $11.98 USD New From: $6.86 In Stock Used from: $3.48 In Stock Release date August 17, 2010.

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By Rudy Klapper, August 9, 2010 8:00 am

Avi Buffalo – Avi Buffalo

Sub Pop 2010

Rating: 7/10

Following a hype train can be a dangerous thing. Follow the right one and you can end up discovering something new and revitalizing, like a Surfer Blood or a Tallest Man on Earth. Follow the wrong one and you could spend hours convincing yourself to like the newest Black Kids CD because, well, dozens of bloggers can’t be wrong! When precocious Long Beach young ‘uns Avi Buffalo released their anticipated debut earlier this year, they had all the prerequisites for their own hype machine: hot single(s), Pitchfork approval, a fairly surprising rating on Metacritic (82!). I listened to one song, judged them as an early Shins knock-off and promptly forgot about them. That’s the problem with hype – too much of it and you go into the listen expecting something utterly mind-blowing, something that will live up to an almost mythic status all this blogosphere talk builds up yet rarely matches. Avi Buffalo is not mind-blowing, nor is it even one of the best debuts I’ve heard this year. Simply put, it’s great, solid indie-pop music, music that merely portends the arrival of a band that has more potential than most their age and some pretty slick songwriting chops.

I really wanted to give this a higher rating, particularly after hearing gems like opener “Truth Sets In” or “Coaxed,” songs that replicate the gentle flow of (yes) early Shins or debut-album Noah and the Whale. It’s twee without being overly cute, something hard to do when your band is besieged everywhere they go by the constant addendum “but they’re only 19!!!” Excellently-named vocalist Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg sounds just like a dozen other indie-pop vocalists, having mastered the art of the high-pitched, fragile whisper and the occasional faux falsetto, but it’s the songwriting that elevates Avi Buffalo from the also-rans. “What’s In It For?” is a fantastic pop single, marrying a beautiful melody to a stick-in-your-head hook and the kind of instant accessibility that future MTV-show soundtracks are made of. That’s not a knock on the band’s obvious penchant for writing songs everyone is interested in nowadays, but a testament to how well the songs click. It helps that Isenberg is actually quite the guitar player, making the unexpected fretwork on tunes like “Jessica” and “Remember Last Time” the highlights rather than the strong pop foundations the songs are built on. Even when the solos go on a bit too long, as they do most egregiously on the 7-and-a-half-minute “Remember Last Time,” Isenberg’s jangly guitar work is pleasant enough to forgive the youthful wankery.

But then there’s songs like the lackluster “Can’t I Know” or the way too much of the latter half of the album bleeds together, something that can’t really be avoided when Avi Buffalo stick strictly to their inoffensive guitar-pop formula throughout. While “Where’s Your Dirty Mind” and “One Last” are good songs in their own right, it’s obvious that Avi Buffalo is a front-loaded record, with the best melodies ending with “Summer Cum.” That last is another divisive issue with the band, being the clearest example of Isenberg’s juvenile lyrical bent. But hey, he’s young, and although in the future he might try a more diplomatic approach to describing adolescent love, it’s nonetheless impressive that Isenberg can turn sheet stains into one of the sweeter love songs of the year. Avi Buffalo wear their musical influences on their sleeves (Built To Spill, the aforementioned Shins, Elephant 6, etc. etc.), and their lyrical direction is more Superbad than J.D. Salinger, but it’s charming without being cloying, poppy without being overly sugary. Most importantly, it’s the kind of debut that leaves you thrilled for what the future may bring, and that’s something special.

Avi Buffalo – “Truth Sets In”

See larger image Avi Buffalo (Audio CD) List Price: $13.98 USD New From: $6.08 In Stock Used from: $2.22 In Stock Release date April 27, 2010.

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By Rudy Klapper, April 12, 2010 12:00 pm

The Apples in Stereo – Travellers in Space and Time

Simian Records 2010

Rating: 5/10

It might surprise some that Robert Schneider’s Apples in Stereo project is the only remaining survivor of that first wave of Elephant 6 collective bands, which reads like a who’s-who of groundbreaking indie pop – the Apples, Neutral Milk Hotel, and the Olivia Tremor Control. All the critical acclaim and classic status has long been lavished on the latter two, but Schneider is the only one of them still trucking along in his original guise, creating increasingly complicated space-age power-pop while Jeff Mangum languished in self-imposed obscurity and the Olivia Tremor Control struggled to recapture their past magic. Detractors would say it’s because Schneider has long been the most single-minded of those original auteurs, mastering the Elephant 6 aesthetic of experimental pop and refining it to a sugary sharp edge but not going much further.  But 2007’s New Magnetic Wonder proved that a sound that had long gone stale on their previous releases could be retooled and reignited in a new direction, taking their predominantly guitar-fueled pop and mixing in plenty of vocoder and ELO-influenced futurism. Travellers in Space and Time continues on that same tick, but falls prey to the same problem that undermined Schneider’s early 2000s releases: the feeling that we’ve all been here before.

Despite its length, New Magnetic Wonder was a surprisingly focused effort, bloating its way to twenty-plus tracks due to numerous minute-or-shorter interludes that enhanced the album’s dreamy vibe. Travellers in Space and Time, for all its similar length, packs far more filler than its predecessor, a fact not aided by the eerie similarity between newer and older songs. “Dream About The Future” is the same kind of bouncy, piano-synth-vocoder combo that New Magnetic Wonder perfected, with an irresistible jackhammer of a hook and Schneider’s perpetually boyish vocals. And being the first proper song on the record, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. But then comes “Hey Elevator,” and then “Dance Floor,” and then “C.P.U.”, and on and on, and before long one is promptly overloaded by Schneider’s vision of “early-seventies R&B played by a UFO.” This wouldn’t be a bad thing, but too much of Travellers in Space and Time sounds like a retread, sounds that are enjoyable on their own but over the course of this 16-track album end up being beat to death, with too many forgettable hooks and overused electronics.

As much as Travellers drags in the middle after the novelty of hearing new Apples in Stereo has worn off, it does redeem itself near the end, more on the basis of Schneider hitting on some of the best melodies of his recent career than on any variance in sound. “Told You Once” is Schneider at his Beach Boys-via-Casio best, and “Floating in Space” stands out more for what it doesn’t do than for what it is – for once, the Apples seem to realize that less is better. It’s proven again and again as Travellers winds down that Schneider does best when he keeps it simple, focusing on his obvious melodic gift and making songs that focus on the heart of everything, rather than cluttering things up with numerous instruments, unnecessary vocoder, or sounds already beaten to death. It’s what makes one wish there were more songs like the lyrically simple, affirming love letter “Nobody But You” or the whimsical trip of “Wings Away,” songs that call to mind their late ‘90s masterpieces. Fans of the Apples will no doubt fall in love with the band again after hearing Travellers, as the things that make them a great power-pop band are all there. But they have the potential to be simply put a great band regardless of genre, one that can, at its heights, stand right up there with Mangum and Hart. It’s just beyond reach here, undermined again by Schneider’s habit of falling into a rut, but perhaps all they need is another shift in sound to recapture that old magic.

The Apples in Stereo – “Nobody But You”

See larger image Travellers in Space & Time (Audio CD) List Price: $15.99 USD New From: $8.35 In Stock Used from: $6.99 In Stock Release date April 20, 2010.