Of Montreal

“We just want to emote ‘til we’re dead.” This epitaph-to-be has become a pretty accurate M.O. for Kevin Barnes’ work during the past half-decade. His band Of Montreal has been a vessel for his theater of the absurd, sometimes to dazzling effect. At his best, Kevin Barnes wrote and produced with the musical gymnastics of a hypothetical David Bowie/T. Rex/Brian Eno collaboration. But Paralytic Stalks, continuing the dizzying trajectory of the band’s past few albums, is annoyingly cerebral, never charming or resonant.

In the past, Barnes’ songwriting was marked by alien turns of phrase he made revelatory: “We want our film to be beautiful, not realistic!” But on Paralytic Stalks, he just speaks in an alien tongue. The turn is admitted in the comparatively low vocal mix, but even the audible lyrics draw conceptual blanks, on lines like “I wanna get all f***** up and tell you how I really feel/ ‘Cause your vibrant blackness coco augury is so unreal,” from “We Will Commit Wolf Murder.” “Malefic Dowery” is full of esoteric, self-referential quotables: “Now I live in fear of your schizophrenic genius/ It’s a tempestuous despot that I can’t seem to propitiate.”

“Authentic Pyrrhic Remission” takes 13 minutes to communicate less than Barnes has in the past with five. This is a major problem for such a complex, heady sound; the occasional brilliant moments are lost in the muddle of an overcooked and high-caloric stew, the work of a manic depressive intellectual whose taken a few too many acid trips and won’t stop gabbing about its ups and downs. Kevin Barnes, after the cathartic life experience that allowed him to create “The Past is a Grotesque Animal,” spoke of the motivation to one day make his “great album.” He came damn close with 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, but since then Of Montreal’s been producing a series of related but inferior albums high on hippy swag but low on meaning. So props to Barnes for chasing his mercurial whimsy of a muse—being a resolute ‘artiste,’ and all that—but somewhere along the line, he lost the plot. As he sings on “Spiteful Intervention,” “There must be a more elegant solution.”