***image1***OF MONTREAL
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
Polyvinyl Records
From the ashes, perhaps still smoldering a bit, of the Elephant Six Recording Company, of Montreal's eighth full-length album,
Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
, is perhaps their strongest, most danceable and complex project to date. The heavy synth, drum machine and bass outline peppered with stratified harmonies make for a heavy twisting, nuanced narrative hinting on the surreal. Whereas Decemberists blurbs cling stupidly to their sleepy shoulder as a "literary" band,
Destroyer
claims a heartier stake on erudition, most noticeably from surrealist writer Georges Bataille's 1928 novel
Story of the Eye
. The song alludes to the book in the track "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal," in which the sublime, erotic and grotesque define the album's countless personified directives. The track's "simple" pleading, "I need you here and not here too/How can I explain this," informs lead singer Kevin Barnes through 12 orchestrally tinged tracks, subdued pleadings and bouts with mood shifts that ultimately lead to an imprecise examination of companionship, lust and loss, while simultaneously delivering the first great album of 2007.
