A lot of my posts are on-the-fly, almost random listenings that I just happen to play at the time. Often, I’ll go grab a record from the other room and blast it and write up a few words on it. But always – no matter how spontaneous it is – I try to make it somewhat decent. This album was the one that I guess you could say really made Of Montreal. They had already developed a strong repertoire before it but Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? really cemented them as a band to be reckoned with. And why not, it was everything you could have hoped for in the early cold months of 2007.You see, this was well before Radiohead’s album and before all the other monster albums of 2007. And although it came out in January, it continued to be remembered as one of the best albums of the year – listening to it now, it’s still spectacular. I was always partial to “Cato as a Pun” for its ever-so-blunt lyrics. Hissing Fauna… was a break-up album – a kiss-off to Kevin Barnes’ then-ex – and this song hit home. “And don’t say that I have changed…because, man, of course I have.” And in the end you just want to be left alone, “is that too much to ask?”
I would almost feel entirely mis-informed and almost, wrong, if I didn’t post about “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” I know it’s probably the safe pick but it’s also that pick for a reason. A torrid, over-ten-minutes-long song that details a broken relationship that is nothing but despair and bitterness. “Throw it all in my face, I don’t care. Let’s just have some fun, let’s tear the shit apart” – the entire song is filled with one-liners. My personal and on-line signature was always, “things could be different but they’re not,” and eventually, he would repeat the line for good measure. It’s really one of the finest songs of the last decade and one of the most memorable, for me, for variously personal reasons (“I’m all, all unraveled. No matter where we are, we’re always touching by underground wires”) but it’s absolutely worth it, too. – Bryan
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