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.