2002-10-17 - Broward Palm Beach New Times

Wayward Son

Is Of Montreal leader Kevin Barnes happy to revisit South Florida? Not exactly.

By Jeff Stratton Thursday, Oct 17 2002

Kevin Barnes isn't from Montreal, nor is he from the Florida subtropics, although he did move from Michigan to Palm Beach Gardens at age 15. But he left when he was 21 and never even glanced back.

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"I don't look fondly on those years. I blocked them out of my memory," says the acclaimed psychedelic poptician from his home in -- where else? -- Athens, Georgia. "I didn't like living in Florida. I never really met anyone else who was on the same wavelength I was on. It was always a struggle to try to make things better, but eventually I just gave up and moved. I'm definitely much happier in Athens than I was down there in West Palm."

That comes as no surprise, since Athens is where Barnes found his current bandmates and fell into the same circles as Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel) and Will Cullen and Bill Doss (Olivia Tremor Control), even becoming their housemate. "It was a little strange," Barnes says about shacking up with the noted Elephant 6 affiliates. "We already felt like a little brother to Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel and Apples in Stereo. Those were the three godheads, and we were kind of underneath them."

Barnes, 28, probably doesn't see it that way anymore. Of Montreal has taken the same totems sacred to the psychedelic pop crowd -- Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds -- and elevated them to outrageously ambitious heights. Each Of Montreal album has been a novella jacketed with a distinct personality, with the new Aldhils Arboretumexploring the sensation of disconnect from one's own community set to colorful little romps ("A Question for Emily Foreman," "Pancakes for One") and fun, hurried pop gems ("Natalie and Effie in the Park," "Predictably Sulking Sara") popped out of a pocket, displayed, and hidden again. The slightly '60s arrangements are weighted with toots and honks and a tambourine's silly shake. An oboe doesn't even sound out of place as lead instrument by the time you've traveled all the way to the arborescent "Kissing in the Grass."

Beyond the obvious influences, Barnes cites early King Crimson, South American crazies Os Mutantes, Kevin Ayers, Robert Wyatt, and Philip Glass. Certainly a far cry from his first musical aspirations, attempted while at Cardinal Newman High School in West Palm Beach, where he began the seeds of a band called Soulcraft (!), known for Metallica, Fugazi, and Jane's Addiction covers. Barnes was the singer. "I had this Jim Morrison complex," he groans. "I thought I was a poet. It was very, very embarrassing. I don't know if anyone has any film documentation, but if they do, I hope they burn it. Those were awkward years. I was very impressionable."

Actually, videotape does exist of the acoustic-oriented songs Barnes was writing and performing just before he headed north in 1994. At the Wormhole, a small record store in downtown West Palm Beach, Barnes introduced some of his first compositions [see "The Caucasian Rock Circle," December 13, 2001]. At Soundsplash, another local CD store, he located copies of two current touchstones -- the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society ("that changed my life forever") and Brian Wilson's long-lost Smile.

Luckily for Barnes, by the time he'd left Florida, he was recording four-tracks in his bedroom (sound familiar?), sending one to the Bar/None label, which snatched Barnes for a three-album deal. He called his first project Trucker's Wife and spent the next few years traveling around the Midwest. During a trip to Montreal, he suffered and subsequently became utterly consumed by a horrific heartbreak, the echoes of which still color his work and gave his band its name. Of Montreal's first record, 1997's Cherry Peel, introduced Barnes' lo-fi, confessional navel-gazing. "Rather than focusing on the negative or even becoming active and changing reality, we were just becoming more introverted, trying to change our reality that way," Barnes explains. The next year's follow-up, The Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy, was a virtual role-play of Barnes' Canadian heart-shatter. The songs were barren and painfully personal but as melodically complex as Cole Porter classics. Therapeutic, no doubt, for Barnes but still bidding a warm welcome to the rest of the world, the mini-symphonies of Bedside Dramasolidified Of Montreal's capable charms.

By 1999's The Gay Parade, Of Montreal began creating strange lands with weird characters. Staring at traffic one day, Barnes rearranged the images in his mind into a sort of abstract parade, each passing vehicle becoming a float and each float symbolizing a brightly colored song. The next year, the band released Horse and Elephant Eatery (No Elephants Allowed): The Singles and Songles Album, capturing stray fairy-tale fragments sans the expected thematic thread but still remaining innocently engaging.

Almost too grand to be believed (and certainly a lot to absorb all at once), 2001's honestly subtitled Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse explodes with untethered creativity. The concept and story line are impossibly intricate, as evinced by titles like "The Events Leading Up to the Collapse of Detective Dullight" and "The Hopeless Opus or the Battle of the Unfriendly Ridiculous." The accompanying booklet features bizarre anthropomorphic cartoon characters like the kind Robyn Hitchcock is known for, but rendered in the style of National Lampoon's M.K. Brown. The results -- festooned with theremin, horns, marimba, even kazoo, earned Coquelicot comparisons to Syd Barrett on Sesame Street.

"It feels dismissive when people say 'very childlike,' because it has this connotation of being frivolous," Barnes complains. "I never want to make something pretentious and too serious. I'm into surrealism and dadaism and absurdism, and the fundamental elements of those movements was a playfulness and a libertine attitude."

Barnes doubts he would have ever found the inspiration for this lysergic imagery if he'd stayed in the land of Jimmy Buffett cover bands. "Everybody in Palm Beach Gardens was into surfing and, oddly enough, country music.

"I really don't feel like Florida is my home -- it's just where my parents happen to live," continues Barnes, who plans to keep his visit low-key. "I'll probably bum around the house, go to the beach, and pray to God I don't see anybody from high school."

2002-10-10 - Dallas Music

Barnes Storming
Athens' Of Montreal gives its whimsical psychedelia a raucous jolt
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By Chris Baty
Published on October 10, 2002

Frank Mullen

They're Of Montreal. Not from Montreal. But I don't know.
At least one of those haircuts is definitely Canadian.
Where: Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios
Details: October 13
Subject(s): Of Montreal with The Arthurs and the Tah Dahs

The Canadian native with the medical condition was angry, and Of Montreal front man Kevin Barnes had no one to blame but himself. The girl had come out to see Barnes' band in New York, thinking she was supporting musicians from her former country. Unfortunately for the patriotic well-wisher, Of Montreal hails from the distinctly un-Northern province of Athens, Georgia. Barnes' explanation--that the group did take its name from a transformative trip to Quebec--didn't really do much for the disgruntled lady.

"This girl had some eye affliction," Barnes reports via phone from a tour stop in Brooklyn. "She said, 'I got out of bed to come see you guys! I thought you were from Montreal. I'm so mad!'"

Of Montreal's accidental status as a Canadian band is perfectly in keeping with the ensemble's whimsical approach to musicmaking. Over the past five years, the group has built a reputation for wildly colorful and psychedelic albums filled with unexpected twists and turns, ruled by the cheerful sort of nonlogic that makes children's books such a puzzle for square adults.

When the band's sound jells--as it did on 1997's savory Cherry Peel and 1998's brilliant The Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy--Of Montreal easily holds its own alongside such pop adventurers as Brian Wilson and Harry Nilsson. But like those creative titans, Barnes and company have a tendency to push the sonic envelope to the point of bursting. If one slide whistle or musical saw part sounds good, the band's reasoning goes, then five would sound even better. The lyrics tend to be just as detail-laden, with Barnes creating a novel's worth of complex characters for every CD. The resulting frantic mélange of clanging bells, kazoos and vaudevillian antagonists made later releases The Gay Parade and Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse a little exhausting, like trying to watch a Saturday of cartoons in a half-hour.

With its fifth full-length, Aldhils Arboretum, though, Of Montreal--Barnes, Derek Almstead (bass), Andy Gonzales (guitar), Jamey Huggins (drums) and Dottie Alexander (multiple instruments)--has scaled back the lyrical ambitions and amplified its sound. Noisy electric guitars now rock in the fields where glockenspiels once frolicked, and the keyboards scream when they used to whisper. For Barnes, it was a conscious attempt to make a record that would shake the hips as much as it would tickle the imagination.

"We had been doing the more theatrical, artsy thing for the past couple years," Barnes explains. "We just thought it'd be fun to do something different and make a record that was a little more danceable, something that people could move their bodies to."

The rawer direction is evident from Aldhils Arboretum's opening track, "Doing Nothing," in which Barnes' wavering, slightly adolescent voice packs a newfound punch. The tune's raucous complaint against stagnation marks a return to the more personal stories that populated Cherry Peel and demonstrates Barnes' continued ability to translate simple observations and passing thoughts into listenable art. That skill is also evident in the album's would-be hit "Jennifer Louise," in which the singer reflects on the distance between him and his young-professional cousin. The absurd joy that swells throughout the paean to an unknown family member is classic Of Montreal--weird and endearing and probably a little unsettling for the song's subject.

"I went to [Jennifer Louise's] wedding and told her about it," Barnes says, laughing. "She seemed a little freaked out."

In another standout track, "The Blank Husband Epidemic," Barnes tells the story of an uncle who gets so tired of his dull breadwinner's life that he fantasizes about driving his car off a bridge.

"I wrote it about myself," Barnes says, "imagining myself if I were to quit music and get a serious job and get married and have kids and go that route with my life. I'd probably be disenchanted with it and become really boring and uninspired."

Running out of musical steam and ending up with a two-car garage in the suburbs is not a risk Barnes faces anytime soon. Like many musicians who have been pulled into Athens' low-distraction, high-output orbit, Barnes and his bandmates spend much of their time working together on home-recording projects. Four of the five members share a house, which tends to speed the work along. The intimate living quarters, though, also provide the kind of insularity that could easily turn obsessive musicians into sun-shy hermits who end up being eaten by their cats.

Becoming the record-collecting recluse on the hill seems an especially high risk for Barnes, who dedicated an entire song on Aldhils Arboretum ("Ode to the Nocturnal Muse") to his pillow. "I love sleeping," he says in explanation. "You can feel everything so deeply. You don't have to worry about all the weird devices that you have in your head, so you can feel love in its fullest. You don't have to repress anything."

Endless sleeping, recording and hanging out--it sounds like the sweet promise of college-town living realized. Does Barnes ever worry, though, that he and his friends spend too many days holed up, dedicating so much energy to translating their still-lives to tape that they don't have time left to go out and live?

"That's the sacrifice," he says. "There's not very much going on in Athens, so pretty much the only thing to do is to work on projects. In a way that's great, but in a way you're missing out on a lot of life experiences, because it's such a small town and it's sort of limited what you can do."

The question, he says, is the same one faced by most artists. "Do we want to be really prolific and have a great body of work, or do we want to spend our money on traveling and seeing the world?"

For now, Of Montreal is in the fortunate position to follow both paths--the band's records have sold well enough to allow it to tour Europe and
Japan, and its current itinerary finds the Athenians crossing the country to get to San Francisco and back.

Despite the extensiveness of the outfit's tour, however, there will be no stops in Montreal, or anywhere else in Canada for that matter. It's probably just as well: The cold and flu season is creeping in there, and, if Of Montreal's previous run-ins have been any indication, the band would have a lot of explaining to do.

2002-07-00 - Rice Zine

From Rice Zine.

intr.o

How did you get started in music? When did you discover the good music you are into now? How did you start creating your own music? Was it an obsession for you or just a talent that sort of developed?

I became interested in music around the age of 14. My first instrument was the drums. I played drums in a couple bands in middle school and high school. I started playing guitar around that time also. I used to sit in my room learning Rolling Stones songs all day long. It was fun because most of their songs have only three or four chords so I was always able to figure them out.

I went through a heavy metal phase in high school and began listening to Motley Crew, Ratt, Kiss...I got really into that music and bought the mags and dressed in ripped jeans and denim jackets the whole nine yards. Sometime around my Junior year of High School I started listening to the Cure, the Church, the Replacements, Flesh For Lulu and different things like that. I discovered the Kinks "Village Green Preservation Society", the Velvet Underground and Nico album,and the Beach Boys "Smile" shortly after high school. Once I moved to Athens I was exposed to os Mutantes, Faust, Soft Machine, the Pretty Things and all sorts of great music.

Since I got my first guitar, around the age of 14, I have been writing a couple songs a month. Most of my early songs were love songs and I used to sing in the style of whoever I was into at the time. I didn't really try to write anything original I tried to write songs that sounded like the bands I was into. It was very frustrating because I never succeeded to write anything that sounded as cool as Brown Sugar or Just Like Heaven or Riders on The Storm or whatever it was I was trying to imitate. When I was about 17 I realized I had a slightly original style of writing and that I should try and develop it.

If I moved to Athens, would I notice all these amazing artist-types walking around with guitars and dreams?

Yes. There are hundreds of bands and singer songwriters in Athens. It is a very cool scene.

athens vs. the whole world

Of Montreal's members are involved in so many side projects! How close are the members of Of Montreal, and does that play into your songwriting? Do you ever have rockstar fights over hotel rooms getting trashed and 'hey i was using that blanket' on the tour bus?

We are really close. I consider them my best friends and I think they would say the same. Jamey, Derek, Dottie and I have all lived together for two years now so we are completely wrapped up in each others lives. Andy doesn't live in the house with us but I feel just as close to him as I do the other members of the band. I'm not sure if the differences in personalities affects the band positively or adversly. We all definitely have very strong personalities. sometimes we get in arguments but we are just like a family in that we all are resigned to living together and don't ever talk of breaking up the band just because so and so and so and so are quarreling over such and such.

Do you feel as if you have done your best work, or that you are working toward something greater than yourself that has yet to be realized?

I definitely feel that of Montreal is a work in progress and that the future is open to any number of possibilities. I don't feel that our best work is behind us. We are always striving to do something different from the previous release and so, though a new album might be considered less enjoyable by some people, at least it won't be a self parody.

idol singers and japan

What has been your biggest fear as an artist?

That I would lose my inspiration for life and art and become a washed up prosaic middle aged bore.

What have you found to be a positive driving force, if anything in particular?

I am very inspired by other people's art. Namely my brother David's work. He is my favorite artist because his style never feels stale. He is alwyas trying to develop his style and work in different mediums and I that encourages me to do the same. We have a special connection.
I am also very inspired by books and film.
Each album was heavily influenced by the writer I was into at the time.

of montreal

How has your experience in music and the success you've achieved effected your writing?

Well I don't really feel like we have been tremendously successful because we all still have to work full time day jobs. My writing has been effected by touring and traveling and just growing older.

Do you think of the band as being successful?

I feel we have been successful artistically but not financially.

Are you happy with where you've come so far?

I feel very good about all of our albums and I am happy that each one has its own personality and charm. I am deffintely not at the point where I just sit back and reflect on all the good times though. I am very excited by the future and think we have a whole lot more left to accomplish.

When are you happiest?

I am most happy when I am free from self consciousness and feel like I am living in the moment. It is rare for me to have that experience but when it comes it is great. I think I am most happy when I am by myself following an entertaining train of thought and oblivious to the outside world.

How would you define your music? New psychedelia? Indie Pop?

I would define it as metamorphosing "now" music with a trailing eye on the past.

Is there one thing that annoys you about reviews for Of Montreal or do you think that your music is well-received, generally?

The only thing that I find annoying about our reviews is when writers dismiss us as childlike and simplistic when in reality our music is anything but simple. I don't think of myself as "deep" but I do feel there is a lot going on musically and lyrically that is over looked by a lot of critics.

james and the giant bee

Your preference in an ideal world:

Analog or Digital?

Analog but using the better elements of what the digital world has to offer.

Vinyl, CD, or Tape?

I prefer C.D.s to vinyl just because I have never owned a hifi turntable so everything sounds muddy on my system. I definitely prefer the art work on 12" and the organic feel of vinyl though.

Promotion or Obscurity?

We have no ambition to remain unknown and unappreciated so we'd definitely prefer promotion over obscurity.

When you are in public places, do you listen in on other people's conversations?

Only if they are talking about Roald Dahl.