Despite having gone to see Beck and Ben Folds in the last two weeks, I’m missing a concert tomorrow night to see my wife do her roller derby thing. And while their latest record is still in the mail, I’m happy to recommend the first album I picked up from Of Montreal entitled “The Sunlandic Twins.”
I won’t pretend I’m all that great at covering why music is “good” or “bad,” but I do know what I like:
I like Of Montreal’s combination of poppy, staccato techno beats and blaring, raw guitars in songs like “I Was Never Young.”
I like the frantic, relentless pace of the fast songs like “So Begins Our Alabee” and “The Party’s Crashing Us Now” and the mellow melodic hues of the slow songs like “Knight Rider” and “I Was a Landscape in Your Dream.”
I like the lyrics, whether they be smart and esoteric (“Boredom murders the heart of our age while sanguinary creeps take the stage / Boredom strangles the life from the printed page”), funny, silly, or lovey-dovey (“Let’s pretend we don’t exist / let’s pretend we’re in Antarctica”), or even weird and near indecipherable (“The chrysalis is breaking and the super ego’s waking
/ I’ve been a gloomy Petrarch with a quill as weepy as Dido”).
Maybe it’s because it’s the band and record I discovered in the same weeks I met my wife in early 2006 and they’re an artist we enjoy listening to together, but I’ve listened to Of Montreal as much or more than any other artist in the last three years or so and I urge you to give them a try, dear reader.
Their live shows are amazing, by the way. Old stuff, new stuff, loud, nasty-raw guitars, and a gallons of gushing energy blasting over the audience.
-nm