Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer? (or “You Are the Destroyer”… maybe)

“The mousy girls screams, ‘Violence, violence!”
"We’ve got to keep our little click clicking at 130 BPM; it’s not too slow. If we’ve got to burn out let’s do it together…”
“Can you touch what I’m saying?”
“There’s the girl that left me bitter. Won’t you pay some other girl to just walk up to her and hit her? but I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I caaaaaan’t"
“I know you’re not her because the girl of my dreams is probably god, but still I want you.”

I will attempt to describe this album in the traditional shortform: Of Montreal meets the Scissor Sisters. They grow their hair out into post-Mohawks and have an absurd dance party.
That’s the best I’ve got, but I don’t really think anyone else will have a satisfactory sum-up of this album. It’s novel.

Hissing still has the familiar mélange of supra-trisyllabic words, catchy tunes, astoundingly simple detaché bass lines, and amazingly weird lyrics that make you want to embrace contradictions of Of Montreal’s oeuvre. This album feels distinctly different. The traits that made some attach the word “Baroque” to exegeses of the Of Montreal sound seem to have disappeared to some extent. That makes this album an exquisite complement to their (in my opinion) magnum opus, Sunlandic Twins. Put the two on your playlist and, of course, have a dance party. All by yourself if you have to.

I couldn’t really find an adjective to explain the kind of excited I am to be seeing them live next March, so instead I’m using all of the adjectives from thesaurus.com. I think these describe my opinion circuitously: athrill, beatific, blissful, cool, crazy, delirious, dreamy, elated, enraptured, enthusiastic, entranced, euphoric, far out, fervent, flipped out, floating, flying high, frenzied, gone, high, hopped up, in exaltation, joyful, joyous, mad, out, overjoyed, rapturous, ravished, rhapsodic, sent, spaced out, stoned, sunny, thrilled, tickled pink, transported, turned on, upbeat, weird, weirded out, wigged out, wild

That’s some weird, wild stuff.

Listen on at least 3 occasions before making any judgments.

For those who like to buy albums after they are released, check out this postcard for a short sample, a ‘purchase’ link, and stainedglassesque pictures:
http://www.polyvinylrecords.com/hissing/

reasons to listen and buy:
- a song named “Bunny Ain’t No Kind Of Rider” that let’s Eva know that she won’t ever have him because to him she’s just some faggy girl and he needs a lover with soul power and she ain’t got no soul power.
- reference to Georges Bataille
- Gronlandic Edit forces me to have an all-alone dance party
- false neologisms.
- who doesn’t love chemicals that make mood shift shift back to good again?
- on a similar note, I swear he said, “chemicals don’t strangle my pet.”
- because you fucking love Of Montreal. and if you don’t you ain’t got no soul power

Reviews:

overjoyed with open-minded objectivity
http://obscuresound.com/?p=289
comments on above review. just so I can have a negative review here. bad http://obscuresound.com/?feed=rss2&p=289
positive without really posting any particular position. cheeky nonetheless.
http://www.paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=368
exuberantly ecstatic:
http://www.saidthegramophone.com/archives/by_underground_wires.php

RIYL:

hmm. Of Montreal… would be a good.. yeah. Scissor Sisters. Other Elephant 6 bands. Enon (it’s a stretch… but all in all I’d have to say, yes.) Honestly, I even feel some Ratatat in this album. RIYL music.
If you live in or have ever visited Athens and you don’t know this band, take a moment to evaluate your value as a human being, then listen to every song this band has ever written sequentially. You won’t like it, but it will be good for you. Like beta-carotene.

Harpoon IPA revisited

From BEER_webalbum

I still prefer a MOJITO for drunkening

From BEER_webalbum

At the Flying Saucer in Nashville, home of the famous Monday $2.50 "Pint Night," (was that what they called it? or was that the Rocket in London (pound pints... sweet)), anyway at this pseudo-beer-oriented bar, one can choose from hundreds of taps, and one of the highly-touted IPAs was Harpoon's. I had had it at the brewery in Boston, and the first, second, and maybe even the third time I tried it in Nashville, I thought that they poured the wrong beer because it was so mild and un-exceptional. I bought a 12 pack, and I've established clearly that it's mild and un-exceptional. However, it is relatively cheap, and it must be placed in the category of 'good' IPAs. It's very well balanced. There is some malt, but of course the hops are the prominent flavor. It's not very bitter - nothing like a dry-hop. I'm spoiled and my tastes are extreme, but I must say I DO enjoy drinking Harpoon IPA, and I think it's very different off the tap at the brewery. My theory is that they don't pasteurize the beer that they serve at the brewery, because I swear it was better there. To their credit, Harpoon's 04 and 05 special cold-ones (I think they were rasberry and then an imperial stout) were exceptional. I would love to have another bottle of that imperial. So, in the end, Harpoon is a quality and trustworthy brewery. UFO and Winter Warmer are reasonably good for what they are. I've never had anything 'bad' from them, and their IPA serves as an easy transition point for entry-level hop freaks.

beatles' autoremixery delights us all

the living beatles have remixed their own stuff into an album called "love", and i think that's just swell. initial listen indicates it's exactly as i expected. the remix is meant to be the soundtrack for a cirque du soleil show of the same name. if you don't know cirque du soleil, you can check them out in the 8th or 9th season of south park in the "quintuplets" episode. i don't have much else to say about it at this point, just that i wanted to beat fretless to the punch on something music related.

Berkshire Brewing Co.: Cabin Fever (Winter, '06)

So, I was downtown during lunchbreak to buy Decemberists tickets, and I thought I'd stop by the highly-touted Parish Cafe for lunch. I'd heard very good things about their sandwiches, and I know they are proud of serving local brews. It turns out, they get recipes from chefs from all over town. The place is always crowded, and the prices are throught he roof, but I'll definitely go back again. The beer menu was local drafts plus the typical domestics, and the bottled menu was extensive for such a little cafe, and the beer prices were average. The menu listing for the sandwich I got (of course, the most expensive one on the menu) is below. It was great, but certainly not worth $15. The beer was interesting. It being just before winter holidays, all of the local beers on tap were seasonals. I picked the Berkshire Brewing Company "Cabin Fever" because I hadn't had it. It was a terrible choice to go with the sandwich, but before and after the sandwich I definitely enjoyed it.
The aroma is definitely sparkling apple cider. It tastes very much like some kind of fruit cider. If it has any alcohol in it, it's completely covered up and tastes very light and fruity. It was definitely a thirst-quencher that I would prefer to have in warmer weather. Hops are present in a good way, but just barely. It's a sad fact that many northeastern breweries tend to make these sweet, spiced winter ales that fail to add anything valuable to the many Belgian, American and other fancy beers that have already done the rounds with fruit and spices. I'm not sure whether BBC used actual spices or fruit, but the overall flavor is mostly fruit and little beer. However, I do think this is better than most and would be great as a spring (northeastern spring... not southern) seasonal to drink before a meal or a beer that counts as a meal (stouts, porters, heavy ales, etc).
One thumb up for doing better than their rivals, but the other thumb down for making a dissapointing style of beer just as plain as always.
As they often do, Beer Advocate reviewers disagreed with my opinion, rating it 85 overall. http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/33/7763. I maintain an ambivalent score between 70 and 80.

**The Blue Ginger / $15.50
Created by: Ming Tsai, Chef/ Owner - The Blue Ginger, Wellesley
A grilled, RARE tuna steak brushed with teriyaki glaze on scallion foccacia with avocado, wasabi aioli, lettuce and tomato. Served with a mild Asian slaw.

belgians: st. louis gueze

From BEER

a gueuze (say guuhzz, as if you were le french) is a belgian style made by blending different batches of lambic. lambic is an old belgian style relying on spontaneous fermentation; you just set your brew in a cave in belgium somewhere and hope the yeast that eats it turns out to be tasty. and in belgium, it often does. tasty, and sour. it may taste like the beer is based on stomach acid, but after you get used to it, it's pretty delicious.
of the two gueuezes i've tasted so far, this one was the inferior. the

From BEER

ingredient list is pretty shameful, including not only sugar but an unnamed sweetener, some preservatives and ascorbic acid, though why they would need to make it more sour is beyond me. it tastes mostly like sour, other characteristics are very hard to make out. i drank it with a meal in luxembourg, so i didn't make notes, but, um, well at least you know it's out there now.

Coming in 2007: South Street Imperial Stout

Hooray! South Street might have an interesting brew in the pipeline! Every Tuesday all the grad students from the department head down to South Street Brewing Co. for a little early week stress relief. As you can imagine I'm a big supporter of this tradition, but I've always been a little disappointed in the mediocrity of their brews. The one exception is the Oktoberfest, which I'm pretty sure I already praised in a previous post, but the pale and the porter, which I typically drink, are solid but noticeably mediocre. The dunkelweizen they introduced last week was decent for an American weizen but thoroughly unremarkable, and their Kölsch is miserable (and I don't just say that because kölsch is perhaps the worst style ever. Theirs is particularly bad...). But this post isn't meant to simply hate on South Street, rather it is to express my excitement over what sounds like the approaching arrival of a beer that promises to be at least interesting!

This Imperial Stout is only brewed every other year, and spends some time aging in the bourbon barrels that have become so popular over the past few years. Mid-Atlantic Brew News didn't have a whole lot to say about what flavors to expect, but they did include this quote from head brewer, Taylor Smack: "It actually moves kinda slow because, you know, it scares the hell out of some people. And we're glad because we don't want them to drink it anyway." So hopefully we'll get some sparks of inspiration coming from what has been a solid but uninteresting selection of brews from South St.

Weyerbacher Insanity

From BEER_webalbum

From BEER_webalbum

From BEER_webalbum

I still like the "Heresy" better (imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels - doesn't that sound amazing?), but "Insanity" is a very interesting an enjoyable cold one. To quote the website, (http://weyerbacher.com/cwo/Beers/index.php?id=7&page_id=23), "Insanity is made by aging our perfectly balanced Blithering Idiot Barleywine in oak bourbon casks... rated number 2 on BeerAdvocate.com's list of the top 50 American Barleywines... Insanity is 11.1% ABV. It is best enjoyed in a brandy snifter and served at 45-50 degrees F." So, yeah. The nose is amazing. Sweet, woody bourbon. Otherwise, it's a very smooth barleywine. The hoppiness is enough to tickle your tongue, but no more. The sweet maltiness covers the alcohol, and the aftertaste is a very pleasant sweet liquor flavor.
Weyerbacher officially rocks.
BTW, I hope no one's missing Cutler rookie-ing with the Broncos tonight. Pretty bad-ass for a Vanderbilt Alumnus.

Homebrew Success!

Up until now this blog has been about reviewing commercially available brews, but it seems like a good place to relate my personal brewing antics as well. So here goes...

The first (successful) incarnation of Simplicity Pale (working title) is officially drinkable! Perhaps even good! The very first incarnation a few months ago turned out to be sour pond water rather than beer because my grain wasn't cracked, but this time everything worked! It's meant to be a very straightforward american pale using as simple a recipe as possible (thus the title), but due to the rather subdued hop flavors it falls more in line with a British pale like Bass, although with fewer of the pronounced candied fruit flavors thanks to the slightly higher efficiency of the american style yeast strain. I had a small tasting party last night for some folks who all seemed to enjoy it, which is the point, I guess. None of the folks there were connoisseurs and so they kinda looked at me sideways when I would say things about the nose and the finish, but they tolerated my snobbishness remarkably well. Although if someone was going to invite me over and give me tasty beer and all I had to do was sit and listen to him to him talk about things I didn't really know anything about I would probably do it... But now on to the flavor profile.

The nose is almost pure sweetness with a hint of caramel and sometimes the ghost of floral hop. On the tongue the first sensation is a burst of sweetness that dies away into fruit with a hint of sour. The hops only show themselves in the dryness of the finish. At times there's a slight off-flavor near the end, but that is showing up less and less now, and the disappearance of that flavor has been concurrent with the decrease in sediment from the keg bottom, so I can't help but think there's a connection. The beer tastes a little young, so I might let it sit in the primary fermenter a little longer in the next batch. Also, I think a little more fresh hop in the nose would be nice, so I'm considering dry-hopping the next batch or perhaps including a purely aroma hop along with the all-around workhorse Cascade.

Stats:
Original Gravity - 1.059
Final Gravity - 1.019
Alcohol % - c. 5.5
IBU (guesstimate) - 25-30

Next planned brew-date is sometime before I go home for Christmas. I'd like to be able to let the batch sit in the primary for the whole break and basically be ready when I get back in mid-January.

belgians: cantillon gueuze

From BEER

this is another gueuze; a pure one this time. they follow the reinheitsgebot even if they don't mention it explicitly. that doesn't stop them from brewing a beer that tastes like stomach acid fresh lemons. even though it tastes pretty good once you accept that it's going to make you pucker, the acidity drives its drinkability through the floor. working my way through the bottle, i got the distinct impression that every sip was bringing my that much closer to an ulcer. truly, i am much impressed that such a cold one can be brewed under the reinheitsgebot, and i applaud the cantillon brewmaster for this feat of brewcraft and yeast catchery. but for the sake of my gi tract's pH, i won't be drinking it very often.

A. le Coq Imperial Extra Double Stout 2001

From BEER_webalbum

From BEER_webalbum

The pictures aren't perfect, but just think... black.
So this may be the strangest (good) beer I've ever had. It's supposedly the original Imperial Stout recipe, which apparently involves some stale ale ... or so the guy at the beer-snob store said. It's like a good Flemish Sour mixed with a nice, typical American stout. I was told it's nothing like American Imperial stouts, but it does taste a lot like an American stout, just with sourness added. The nose is flemish sour, the aftertaste is american stout, and the taste on the tongue is half way between.
I like it, even though it sounds absolutely disgusting. It's well aged, but I can't tell cause I've never had anything remotely similar before. Maybe this beer can be my transition to Flemish Sours proper, which usually just taste like old lambics to me... which they basically are... right? eh. whatever. This is definitely a good one to try at least once.

Stone: Oaked Arrogant Bastard 2006

From BOS_webalbum

From BOS_webalbum

I don't really know how to describe this beer. I really need to figure out what some of these tastes are because I know them so well, but I don't know exactly what they are. I know, for one, that this beer is hoppy as hell, of course, and it tastes amazing. I love the aftertaste, which is of straight hops on your tongue and teeth, backed up by a subtle, sweet maltiness. This also describes the beer to some extent. It doesn't taste like much on the back of the tongue, but at the front and the sides, the hops and alcohol come out nicely and the malty body holds it up well. The oaked flavors counter-balance the sweetness very effectively. For me, this is a drinking beer, as opposed to Double Bastard, which might be a sipping beer. Now if only they could bring it down below $15 a sixer...