In 2013, Georgia pop band of Montreal broke out of their critical slump (which involved ventures into R&B and 20th-century avant-garde music) with lousy with sylvianbriar, a work that was informed by Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan as much as bandleader Kevin Barnes’ trip to San Francisco. It was their best work since 2007’s classic Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, a breakup album that possessed even more of the Barnes’ personality quirks, complete with a concept calling for him to transform into his own Ziggy Stardust, a transgender black man named George Fruit. The stylistic exercise of lousy with sylvianbriar works again for Barnes as he takes on the 70s and New York for the follow-up, Aureate Gloom, which is an uncharacteristically straightforward entry into the of Montreal discography.
Aureate Gloom shows the telltale signs of a midlife crisis, which makes sense considering Barnes turned 40 last May. For starters, there are the vocal wails of the disco-funk opener “Bassem Sabry” that give way to the dejected harmonies that drive the verses of “Empyrean Abattoir,” indicative of a beat up middle aged person figuring out how to figure out exactly who they are again. Nocturnal imagery about “troubled dreams” could potentially be clarified by “you made my sky a graveyard and my moon a funeral,” but it’s all Barnes speak (Read: heightened language) for what he’s provided in layman’s terms in interviews: among other troubling events, personal disappointment, and disintegrating relationship, he and his wife had separated well over a year ago.
Aside from the emotional weight Barnes has thrown behind Aureate Gloom, it’s surely an Elephant 6 album (Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control etc.), in that there is an appreciation for the 60s and 70s here that makes the album a pleasant front to back listen. This will surely appeal to fans of the group’s mid-aughts breakout albums such as 2004’s Satanic Panic In The Attic and 2005’s The Sunlandic Twins. With the period in which of Montreal ushered in lousy with sylvianbriar, Barnes may have just settled back into a late-career consistency that is reliable enough to be off-putting. But like the similar arc in legendary rapper Ghostface Killah’s career, new influences and experiments are being ushered into this project, albeit to fit a more fan-pleasing blueprint.
The difference between Aureate Gloom and its predecessor, however, is the humor. The laughs always came with a certain tongue-in-cheek approach shared by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, so lousy with sylvianbriar’s “Helgira Émigré” fire lines off in a full-on Bob Dylan ramble like, “She gave him head till she lost a tooth, that’s what she gets for molesting people in the DJ booth.” Okay Barnes, we’re not even going to read into your possible political metaphor here, but rather smile and nod. This time around, he adopts Beckett’s nihilistic disposition more clearly than on previous efforts, singing, “and now you’re back in Knoxville masturbating your father’s pain.” The scenario is grave, but you manage to scratch your head or chuckle. It’s easier to laugh at what Barnes has to say at his most melancholy because Aureate Gloom is a testament to someone who does care about figuring out the answer to his own existential questions, even making someone else’s father an empathetic character. Beckett, on the other hand, once cast his lead character’s father as a man who lived in garbage bin and it was hilarious. Kevin Barnes could never.
Rating: 3.5/5