2008-12-10 - Filter

Filter's Top 10 of 2008, Day 10: Dottie Alexander of Of Montreal

by Staff | 12.10.2008

Dottie Alexander of Of Montreal has taken time from her busy winter tour to share her thoughts on the best five albums of the year. Alexander knows a thing or two about catchy indie rock music, with her band's latest album Skeletal Lamping being featured on a few artists' top ten list. Check out her list to see why her favorites can be summed up in merely five picks and tune into erockster to hear these and other great songs!

Dottie Alexander of Of Montreal:

1. Queens of the Stone Age, Era Vulgaris (Interscope) - I get something new from this record every time I listen to it. It's a sneaky trap that sucks you in with blatant bad-assness, and keeps you surprised with its subtlety.

2. Caribou, Andorra (Merge Records) - What can you say about Dan Snaith? His records almost make me angry with their sheer brilliance. Andora might have technically come out in 2007, but it was my constant companion of 2008, and therefore makes my list.

3. Tilly and the Wall, O (Team Love) - Who's more sincere than my sweet Tillys? These cats and kittens have chops for days and sing beautifully sad, funny, sweet, and above all honest songs that resonate long after the disc stops spinning.

4. Stars, In Our Bedroom After the War (Arts & Crafts) - This gem was on near constant repeat both in my car and in my house. There's something soundtrack-ish about this record that makes me mentally narrate my own life.

5. MGMT, Ocacular Spectacular (Sony) -Yes, they do, in fact, rule. From the kitchen floor covered in butter to the media darlings they've become, this AMAZING record speaks for itself. Well done, lads.

2008-10-07 - Nylon

MIXTAPE: OF MONTREAL

Kevin Barnes puts together a playlist of songs you won't find on your friend's iPod.

His last album may have been one of the best of 2007 and his live shows may have gained a cultish following, but of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes doesn’t care what success looks like.

“Writing songs is like my form of meditation, it legitimizes my existence in a way,” he explains. “During the lean years when we weren’t selling records, I never thought of throwing in the towel, because there’s nothing else I’d rather do.”

Except put together a playlist for NYLON, that is. Check out Barnes’s 15 favorite tracks—“all these deep cuts that weren’t necessarily singles, that aren’t that popular, and you can’t find on anyone’s iPod playlist”—while you wait for the new of Montreal album to come out later this month.


Prince - "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker"
I feel like it’s one of the most overlooked pop gems in the history of pop music. It’s so surprising and different from anything Prince has ever done—it’s almost like a different person wrote it.

Joni Mitchell - "Car on a Hill"
I really love what she does with her voice—these vibrato harmonies where it’s layering the harmonies herself. That’s something I do all the time.

David Bowie - "Panic in Detroit"
It seems like it would be a real muscular rock song or whatever, but it sounds more Latin, with percussion and a rock drum behind it, which makes it cooler.

Iggy Pop - "Turn Blue"
He’s fantastic because he’s the best combination of masculinity and sexual ambiguity. It’s kind of silly, but I fantasize about that era with Pop and Lou Reed and Bowie hanging out together, and the freedom they had in terms of experimenting musically and trying the taboos that they saw all around them.

Neil Young - "Expecting to Fly"
This is just a beautiful love song. It’s so heartbreaking. I mean, there are so many love songs and most of them have no impact at all. This is one of the few exceptions.

Television - "Venus De Milo"
I’ve never heard anyone else write guitar melodies lines like Television. All you can hope for [as a musician] is to create a personal stamp that no one else uses.

Sly & the Family Stone - "Family Affair"
Sly is definitely one of my all time favorites. It was really influential to me because there’s a friskiness that you don’t get in a lot of indie rock and mainstream music.

Curtis Mayfield - "Move On Up"
If you’re facing a really difficult personal situation, a lot of people feel like, “Okay, I’m just going to make something that revels in the darkness.” But he turned to something more powerful, and was able to create something more uplifting and positive. It really struck a chord with me, and was the same sort of thing I tried to do with Hissing Fauna.

The Beatles - "Happiness is a Warm Gun"
I was a huge Beatles fanatic for a long time. The great thing about them is you can see the progression: They started as really simplistic and sweet, but eventually they became more experimental.

The Kinks - "Autumn Almanac"
I also went through a huge Kinks phase about 10 years ago. The great thing was that even though the Kinks were a huge band, Ray Davies always wrote his songs as an outsider, and that comes across in the music.

The Velvet Underground - "Sister Ray"
The Velvet Underground took so many chances, it’s amazing that they even existed and persevered through all that.

Stevie Wonder - "Boogie on Reggae Woman"
Every time this song goes on, you’re like, “Hell yeah, this is the song! This is what I want to hear!” You can’t sit still.

Motley Crue - "Live Wire"
I was super obsessed with Motley Crue in 8th grade and I really didn’t listen to them for another 15 years. But recently I was thinking about them and realized that I still like them. That’s a sign of something, that I can listen all these years later and still like it.

Neutral Milk Hotel- "Song Against Sex"
Even though the lyrics were sort of ambiguous and abstract, I’ve actually cried at Neutral Milk Hotel shows, which I’ve never done before. My whole body reacting to the music—it’s so beautiful and strange and exceptional and the only thing I can do is cry.

Roxy Music - "Virginia Plain"
We have a lot in common with the whole ‘70s glam scene, where they injected playfulness into the scene that was bogged down by the intellectualism of prog rock.

2008-11-21 - Drowned In Sound

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes loves...

by Andrzej Lukowski

Surprisingly, horses and unsavoury sexual accessories are off the menu as Of Montreal’s pervert-in-chief shares five things he loves with DiS.

And - ahem - speaking of that, one thing DiS loves is Of Montreal’s new, X-rated kaleidoscope of an album Skeletal Lamping, which you can currently vote for alongside 49 inferior records (I may be biased) in Rough Trade and DiS’s People’s Voice Prize.


The Wurdle ap for my iPhone

This game is crazy addictive! I don't even know why, since I'm not that into Scrabble or Boggle or other word games. I am weird about games though. I can go years without playing any, and then discover one that I freak on for a month straight. I was like that for Metroid and the first Legend of Zelda too. Wurdle is basically a game where you try to find words within a jumble of letters. It sounds boring but, for some reason, the whole band is hooked on it right now.

iPhone

While I'm on the subject, my iPhone is probably my favourite possession at the moment. It's really the coolest phone ever. I mean, I've got a four-track recorder, a guitar tuner, a satellite map of the world, a GPS device, loads of games/songs/films/photos... all in my pocket. I feel sort of embarrassed by my own enthusiasm for this, but I can't lie, this device is the bitch.

'Sex Shooter'

This is a fantastic song, sung by Apollonia and written by Prince. I love her voice on this. It's just the right combination of slutty and playful. Purple Rain is one of my all time fave films, and the scene of Apollonia 6 performing this song is so hottt! I was only like 14 when I first heard/saw it, but some erections, it would seem, last a lifetime.

Jimmy Stewart films

I love JS. Whenever shit gets too crazy, I can always watch one of his films and come down a bit. My faves are You Can't Take It With You, The Philadelphia Story, Rope, Harvey, Bell, Book And Candle, Anatomy Of A Murder and Rear Window. He looks so handsome and seems so charming and cool. English-language cinema, in the 1930s through the 50s, was quite rad. Some of my other favourite actors from that time period are Cary Grant, Clark Gable and John Barrymore. My favourite film from that era is either All About Eve, The Great Dictator or The Sweet Smell Of Success... or The Magnificent Ambersons or The Maltese Falcon... I don't know, there are far too many to choose from!

The Cleveland Browns

The Browns are my all time favourite sports team. I've loved them since I was a kid, and my obsession/enthusiasm hasn't waned at all over the years. I can rattle off (pretty much) the starting offense and defensive squads without much deliberation. My fanhood for a major sports team makes me a bit of an oddity in the indie-rock world but I don't care. It's not something I choose to foster, I just can't help myself. The thing about the Browns is that they're the sort of team that finds a way to lose more often than win. They might be leading the opposition by a seemingly unapproachable margin, only to completely choke and somehow manage to lose in the end. It's been that way ever since I was a child. All the same, every year I nervously watch every game possible and scream and cheer (mostly scream) at the TV as the Browns march back and forth across the field. Then at night I lie in bed and replay each moment of the game in my head and anguish over each mistake. It's kind of a curse actually.

2007-05-18 - XLR8R

Five Star By Kevin Barnes

May 18 2007 • Text by Ken Taylor

On Of Montreal's "My British Tour Diary," from the Athens, GA-based psych-pop band's 2004 album, Satanic Panic in the Attic, frontman Kevin Barnes complains about London cab drivers playing "the most truly repellent techno music ever made." But it's clear from the crooked beats, wild synths, and disco rhythms that permeate Of Montreal's latest opus, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, that Barnes has got plenty of love for techno's founding fathers. Here, he waxes poetic on the electronic music pioneers who have influenced his sound.

1. Brian Eno
The culture god's godfather of ambient music. The flaming beast of the glam art scene. The wet nightmare for the bourgeoisie. The totem animal for all who care about keeping the heart in the head. The gilded-feather altar from which freaky high births occur at random.

2. Pierre Henry
Creaking-door effect to the pantomime of modern ages. Soul brother to pedantic subverters. Gift of wisdom for nocturnal plasmic creatures. Saltine wafer disturber for virgin palettes and, what's more, a lot of fun to try and dance to. Ageless, raceless, sexless.

3. Raymond Scott
Un-insane genius. Inventor of glass frequencies that can't be operatically destroyed by hairy sub-evolutionists. Friend to the womb and casket. Comrade to the illiterate meditation rooms populated by demi-glace mustache designers and anti-depressant children of no age.

4. Arnold Dreyblatt
Hyperactive, bounceable, anti-gravity, trampoline, parachute salvation music. The sound of moondog alien anxieties and reverse-pale-fantasy labyrinths. Grey pleasures and honeyed lotion solutions to improper dilemmas. Hero to the calm water sensitives and bathers of Olympia.

5. La Monte Young
A post-thought genius of Duchampian glory. Non-Mormon Fluxus celebrations depriving the growling beast nature of its poison. Drones that deliver the message of the unending shattering and reformation of an untouchably cosmic salvation.