- of Montreal's Kevin Barnes is never a man to make records that you can just simply enjoy. With each release, year after year, there's always something to excite, surprise and not always, but often, terrify. The twee pop with which the of Montreal name has become synonymous comes, more and more, spiked with something that'll bend your mind a bit and leave an acrid taste on your tongue. Whatever else you might say about Paralytic Stalks, this record undeniably takes that trend to a new extreme. On the opening half you'll only notice it in the lyrics. Right from the comparatively sparse and spacey rocking of opener Gelid Ascent, Barnes is lambasting someone for all the crap they've pulled on him. That's clearly not enough, though, because in Spiteful Intervention he starts pouring the vitriol all over himself as well. It also becomes clear that the unnamed other, on this track at least, is his wife; ouch. For a long time now Of Montreal has been essentially a solo project with Barnes pulling in an old mate here and there to help out as necessary. Paralytic Stalks features only hired session musos and I wonder if Barnes was a bit too embarrassed to engage in such an extended and personal diatribe around people who actually know him. So, an album's worth of psychological horror this might be, but not everything is an outpouring for the therapist's couch. Much of the music is incongruously upbeat, making you feel like the blistering nastiness is delivered with a wry smile.
Hearing the lyrics "I spend my waking hours haunting my life / I made the one I love cry tonight / And it felt Good / Still there must be a more elegant solution" as a big pop chorus, it's hard not to crack a smile too.
The pop that I speak of takes a path down the middle of the styles that Mr. Barnes has dabbled with over the years. Between, on the one hand, the artiest kind of Beatlesesque pop and ELOesque electronic dance rock funking away on the other and, it's so full on, it leaves your senses tingling, highly entertained but exhausted. Like the eye of the storm, the small and gentle folk song that is Malefic Dowery still confronts and confuses with lyrics like "Now I live in fear of your schizophrenic genius / It's a tempestous genius / That I can't seem to propitiate" (propitiate means 'the act of appeasing - btw), but apart from that it is a welcome respite and one that you'll come to remember fondly as you're launched into Paralytic Stalks hellish second act. First off we got 9 minutes of full-on electro funk assault in Ye, Renew The Plaintiff, then a disorienting genre surf through the similiary epic Wintered Debts which dissolves half-way, into an unnerving collage of noise before making the briefest folky recapitulation, like crawling on to a rock in the middle of a raging sea. Barnes has said in interviews that he was strongly influenced by 20th Century modernist composers like Charles Ives and Krzystof Penderecki and if we hadn't thought so already, the entirety of Exorsismic Breeding Knife's 8 minutes is an almost shapeless seething mess of experimental sound. The album's final number Authentic Pyrrhic Remission, makes a stab at a funky, feel-good finish after all that existential horror, but Barnes just can't leave it at that, throwing in another great big swath of swelling, ambient sound. He himself sounds quite exhausted as he mumbles "Until this afternoon I was an exile / And now that word is obsolete / The ontonations know concept of ego / Our illumination is complete", I don't know exactly what it means, but Barnes sounds relieved.
I've painted this all as something very confronting, and it is, especially by the standards of what was once a 'twee pop' band. It isn't bad though, in its urelentingly smashing qualities it's something that is both coherent and rewarding if you've got the stamina for it. Some people seem quite offended that Paralytic Stalks goes as far as it does, but if this was an Omar Rodriguez Lopez album, would they still be? Maybe they don't listen to Omar Rodriguez Lopez. Closer to Of Montreal's traditional sounds, what about Sufjan Stevens' last album - for my money Paralytic Stalks is much more approachable and balanced than that is and at least as (destructive, er, I mean) rewarding for the listener. Well, there's hardly any need to say something as divisive as that, whatever you may think of Paralytic Stalks it's doing a fine job of dividing the people all by itself.

- Chris Cobcroft.