Of Montreal - Aureate Gloom

Thirteen albums in just under two decades: that’s impressive by anyone’s standard. Glam-pop, sugar-high psychedelia, synth-funk, and even the God-awful hipster-referencing PBR&B – the Athens, Georgia outfit have kept the genre-taggers busy since the mid-’90s. Prolificacy clearly isn’t an issue for Kevin Barnes’ gang. Consistency on the other hand...
Barnes recently summed up latest effort Aureate Gloom perfectly in six words: “Sort of all over the place.” Which is understandable given he was going through the breakdown of an 11-year marriage during its gestation.
Barnes, a man troubled, debunked to NYC, where he trawled the streets of Greenwich Village in search of divine inspiration from its coloured past, before rounding up the band to record at Sonic Ranch, Texas.
The results are, well, interesting. Musically, it’s a challenging, fragmented journey through nu-folk, glam-pop, disco, and derivatives of every other sound Of Montreal have previously jostled with. But ride it out and you’ll be rewarded with some lyrical gems: there’s “You made my sun a graveyard and my moon a funeral,” on ‘Empyrean Abbatoir’; and “Just as the volcanoes of Cuauhnahuac/we were once stable/so sad I must bury every thought of you before it shows its teeth” on ‘Virgillian Lots’.
On Aureate Gloom Barnes is clearly a man in turmoil. But he is still capable of making a real connection.

Key Track - 'Virgillian Lots'