of Montreal - Paralytic Stalks

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/OfMontreal_Paralytic_Stalks_2012.jpg

Paralytic Stalks is the upcoming eleventh full-length studio album by of Montreal, it will be available in stores on February 7. There will also be a special-edition "Fuchsia Purple" vinyl, which is limited to 1,500 copies. To support the release of the album, of Montreal is planning an American tour, starting in March

i still have high hopes though i didn't play False Priest all that much

Yeah False Priest was a bit of a dud after a string of great albums. Think he might've been better off waiting a bit longer with this one.

I thought False Priest was miles better than Skeletal Lamping, which only had a couple of great songs (most notably Plastis Wafer)

ya, false priest had some really great jams. but a good deal that i'd skip over every time too.

anyhoo, "dour percentage" from the new one is floating around and is pretty fantastic

I loved false priest, probably my most listened to album of the the last 2 years. looking forward to this one.

based on one listen i fear that this record is awful.

Certainly not awful. But since Satanic Panic .. and The Sunlandic Twins I have never really loved an Of Montreal album. My first impression is that is a return to form. But I have thought that before and only end up loving a few songs of it.

so this has leaked, need to find it

really want this to be good

Ummm...

Errrr...

Argh...!

Hmmm...

Zzzzzz....

This is dreadful, of course.

i feel like of montreal existed in this world solely to give us 'the past is a grotesque animal'

that's not their best song. dunno why everyone bangs on about it all the time.

yeah this is awful

I still can't forgive them (or muster any excitement for further releases) for being so God-awful the last time I saw them that we up and left not five songs into the set. They were that bad and that was only a couple years after putting on one of my favorite live shows of all time. RIP.

My go-to OM is Gronlandic Edit. I play that almost every day, it doesn't get old to me. Is this new album really dreadful, or just to people who don't *like* Of Montreal? (No real idea which way Alfred 'swings'..)

also, Lysergic Bliss is so great for jogging! It even tells you to remember your breathing!

but no, this isn't a very good album. it's like he's now obsessed with becoming the Steve Vai of indie-pop and forgotten about writing anything close to a memorable hook.

Gronlandic Edit is my favourite/go-to as well FFM.

E - you make me feel better about skipping their last Toronto show. I did go to one in err, ~2008ish? which was a lot of fun, but skipped the recent one because I was sick or something.

He's doing Steve Vai imitations with his voice instead of his guitar.

xposts ooh, and Lysergic Bliss! Seems we share the same OM tastes.

dog latin otm

i love of montreal but "gronlandic edit" is probably my least favorite song from hissing fauna

dog latin: I've got your back in the city! :D

k3vin :(

my POO of montreal is probably:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKj3pWkzbo

Gronlandic Edit is one of my favourite songs - it's the album's centrepiece, has a cool disco-funk bassline, a big doo-wop soar, and the lyrics seem to tie the record together quite neatly. Oh well, chacun son gout.

Lex - I think I saw them twice in 2008 and both shows were amazing and some of the most fun live music I've ever seen/heard. The last one was so bad it was embarrassing tbh.

I like Gronlandic edit but my fave OM songs are So Begins Our Alabee and Suffer for Fashion prob.

If I had to POO it would def be Alabee.

many xps oooh, haven't heard that for a long time. thanks, k3v!

Yeah we got Bowie cover encores at the show I went to? The costumes were amazing too.. and a very small venue. Next time in Toronto, they played a sit-down venue, which is the one I skipped.

I went through a huge Suffer for Fashion stage. Alabee too. let's be honest I like almost all these songs so I am just going to otm everyone with every rec except for that early really indie stuff which just didn't do it for me - I want my Of Montreal weird and shiny and flamboyant or at LEAST covering Yoko Ono!

Gronlandic Edit also sampled in that Girl Talk song so perfectly, I think it further endeared me to the song.

I've seen em twice - once in London at a gig around the time of Skeletal Lamping, and another at a fest in Barcelona last year. Both times were fun, if a bit sub-Flaming Lips in execution.

It feels weird to realise that this will be the third OM album to come out since I started going out with my girlfriend. I say this because the 2008 gig was our first concert together.

hahah dog latin is my bizarro husband, clearly, because I'm pretty sure the 2007 (in Toronto, it turns out) show was the first I went to with mine

I'm trying to work out what makes this album so much worse than Hissing Fauna/Skeletal Lamping - I think it's because before those albums mapped his soul searching onto a wider psychological plain - the whole Controller Sphere thing. It was genuinely interesting, like a drugged cross-examination of the human psyche, throwing up these alter-egos, desire lines and Freudian slips every which where. Now it seems the lyrics are just endless navel-gazing, "woe is me", "fuck my life" etc..

Rather than being shown a technicolour projection of Barnes's soul, the listener is forced into the role of couch-side therapist, counsellor and security blanket. At first it was fun, now it's really difficult to have empathy - like the jilted friend who months after the break-up only wants to get drunk and moan about their lives. There's only so much empathy in my soul before I want to scream "FOR FUCK'S SAKE KEVIN MAN THE FUCK UP!".

I guess I'd like to know more about the context of this new one - Hissing Fauna was inspired by a break-up and subsequent depression, but didn't he get back with his wife? I guess depression doesn't necessarily come back just because all is well with the world, huh?

hmmmm, this puzzles me as i found skeletal lamping mostly rotten and the last one really fun. so does thie one not have hooks?

don't love this, but it's kinda fun to put on in the background while you're cleaning or something because every 8 minutes or so you get punched in the face out of nowhere with an amazing melody.

'dour percentage' is great through and through though

listened to gay parade the other day for the first time in years, and it's still so fucking good. i don't think any of the other albums really come close.

Haha, as it happened I put it on while defrosting the freezer tonight and it did sound better on a speaker system. On headphones it's almost too much, just a confusing mess blasting into your ears, but it kind of comes into its own when you can step away from it and concentrate on other things... I dunno - it's gonna take a listen or two.

Quel surprise, it's the worst thing evah on this forum for a while

listened to gay parade the other day for the first time in years, and it's still so fucking good. i don't think any of the other albums really come close.

― Jacques_Lamure, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 7:11 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think the good songs on Coquelicot are better than anything on The Gay Parade, but the garbage on Coquelicot probably makes The Gay Parade the best overall album.

I guess I'd like to know more about the context of this new one - Hissing Fauna was inspired by a break-up and subsequent depression, but didn't he get back with his wife? I guess depression doesn't necessarily come back just because all is well with the world, huh?

so i read somewhere, probably on Wiki (which is blocked today), that he tried to get personal again with this album. he is having trouble with his marriage again.

i think people are missing the point of Skeletal Lamping for me it only really works as an album, listening to just a song here or there doesn't work for some reason. never did warm up to False Priest should give it more time as i do own the CD.

yeah it was Wiki"

The recording of the album is dense, features dark tones, and an indiscriminate eclectic nature both electronically and aesthetically. The album features a wide array of music, ranging from "pseudo-country" to, to a larger degree, neo-prog.

Barnes's lyricism also returns to the confessional style heard in Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, entailing dark topics such as revenge, self-hatred, the human condition, and his painful relationship with his wife Nina. It has been called his most personal recording to date.

i think this is rather good. i liked the last one too. perhaps i have low standards.

"Dour Percentage" is incredible.

this is growing on me now.

The other song they're previewing, "Wintered Debts," is kind of reminiscent of "No Conclusions" from Icons, Abstract Thee.

Okay, WTF this is really starting to worm its way in now. Still really dislike the lyrical approach: "I spend my waking hours haunting my own life/I made the one I love start crying tonight/And it felt good/Still there must be a more elegant solution" is probably the worst chorus ever written. That said, there are some great tunes - the stretch from Dour Percentage to Malefic Dowery is really quite pleasant.

Streaming on the Spin web site in case anyone's interested in listening to it there. Quite like the last track in addition to the two that I already mentioned. That John Lennon bit at the end is something.

Reviews out today.

I still can't get my head around this record. There are bits that are quite obviously genius, but they're totally surrounded by chaos.

Is this as awful as the Pitchfork and Popmatters suggest?

Bigger question, if I thought the run from Satanic Panic to Hissing Fauna was genius, liked Skeletal Lamping okay, and absolutely hated False Priest, should I bother with this one?

it's the same as me jon - liked em all except FP (never really got the hang of Sunlandic Twins either). Think this is actually quite close in spirit to ST, it's just very busy and cacophonous. I'd say that the middle three songs are actually pretty good, but the rest is just confusing.

I really like the guitar on "Ye, Renew the Plaintiff."

The lyrical flow is always clunky with him it seems, and maybe it doesn't have hooks, and the arrangements are overly busy, but the melodies are really good from the bits I've heard.

My relationship with OM is weird - I got onboard with Satanic Panic, went back and bought all the earlier albums (dug most of them apart from Cherry Peel and Bedside Drama), stuck with them up to Skeletal Lamping which I absolutely hated, then gradually went off the band to the extent that I sold off all the CDs... apart from Satanic Panic, which I still love. There are other songs I still like here and there, a few on Coquelicot for example.

OK, fan alert. This is hot:

http://www.rollingstone.com/videos/new-and-hot/of-montreal-dour-percentage-on-fallon-20120209

So the first half of this isn't too bad actually, but Barnes disappears deep up his own ass once he gets to the run of 7+ minute songs. Which is kinda sad because based on "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", he used to be able to make something that long engaging.

I think the soundscape in the middle of "Wintered Debts" is v. pretty!

me review of this

nice!

Thanks Alfred :-)

Great review, I think it nails a lot of the problems with the album.

I didn't know we were Quietus colleagues either, dog.

Thx. Yeah, been contributing occasional bits for about a year now :-)

I love this band, and there are some gorgeous moments on this record but at this point, I'm ready for them to take a loooooong break of say five years or so.

After reading just about every review of this, I'm compelled to propose more consideration of the level of craft in this guy's music. People obviously have different views on the compositions, but when it works for me it's pretty stratospheric.

totally

I love this band, and there are some gorgeous moments on this record but at this point, I'm ready for them to take a loooooong break of say five years or so.

― Roz, Friday, February 24, 2012 1:56 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^ how i felt after their last album

Saw a set list from the tour and the show ended with "No Conclusion," "Authentic Pyrrhic Remission 1," "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal," and "Authentic Pyrrhic Remission 2."

for what it's worth -

this is my album of the year and my favourite OM album by a mile. it's almost completely abandoned OM's sassy zine-courting indie-pop remit, so I can see why it's lost most of the band's fans. for prog-head sonic-junkies like me though, it's bliss

just utterly fearless and spectacular, and to convey mental breakdown so vividly and imaginatively while composing *really* good rollercoaster-ride songs is a really difficult thing to do - kudos mr barnes

I voted for this in the album of the year poll. It took me a while but I've grown to really appreciate it.

this did make the unranked part of my list this year. i have never warmed up to it like other albums. still think Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? was their peak.