It begins with one, solitary mp3.
‘Wintered Debts’ arrived in our Inboxes, RSS Feeds and news streams last year, an eight minute – eight minute – long cross section of the new of Montreal album. Far from blog ready fodder, ‘Wintered Debts’ was at once immediate and confounding, with Kevin Barnes veering away from the plastic funk of ‘False Priest’ and towards something less accessible. Now lingering on the ClashMusic stereo, parent album ‘Paralytic Stalks’ is a work of tremendous contradictions – more complex but less abstract, less melodic but increasingly contagious, the album is an imposing, fascinating beast.
“With ‘Paralytic Stalks’ I wanted to make something which was quite a bit more ambitious artistically” the songwriter explains. “Working with longer songs, basically taking myself out of the race as a far as being commercial goes. I really like working with that canvas, I really like sending people on this journey where there’s a lot of twists and turns. To me, it’s really exciting – I do have an appreciation for prog rock, especially the early King Crimson records, the Soft Machine records. So there’s a part of me that’s always enjoyed those compositions.”
King Crimson and Soft Machine are perhaps apt comparisons – both bands stood at a point in time when rock was fragmenting, accepting the influence of jazz and avant garde classical composition. In a similar spirit, Kevin Barnes deliberately opened himself up to as wide a range of inspiration as possible. “I wanted to make something which took the best elements of pop and avant garde classical music and make something which had never been created before” he asserts. “It wasn’t really following any specific template but I guess you could say there were similarities to early prog rock and some avant garde classical, The Beatles.. mixing up some soul, some funk – mixing up all these different elements to create something which has originality to it.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that ‘Paralytic Stalks’ is one of the most original albums you will hear this year. The sheer range of ideas rippling through the songwriting is bracing; demanding and stretching your patience in equal measure. To borrow Simon Reynolds’ term, this is Indie Maximalism – banishing the deity of the pop song, of Montreal act as an aggregating point for ideas, influences, genres. A suitable comparison, I put it to Barnes, would be the last Sufjan Stevens album, which had a similarly sprawling nature. “That’s a record that when I heard it, it reminded me of what we can do as musicians. It reminded me how much potential there is in recorded music that you don’t have to make something that is pleasing or satisfying or accessible, you can let your psyche go wild and make something which is difficult and challenging and not for the masses, necessarily. It’s not supposed to be easily digestible, I think. I don’t know if that was his intention but that was what I got out of it.”
“I’m staggered. I can’t even imagine that a human being could make a record like that because it’s been so long since I heard a record that had that sort of impact” he continues. “In a weird way, I think people who love music love Sufjan and love that record, but then people who don’t really understand music that much it’s this superficial thing which they listen to every once and a while. They wouldn’t really get a record in that way. I guess in a way I was making a record for lovers of the art form, for people who love music. Probably the greatest form of art, in my mind at least.”
‘Paralytic Stalks’ is an album which demands almost as much from the listener as the artists responsible for its creation. A lengthy, probing work, the moments of blissful, pointed beauty are split by shredding, orchestral blades of emotion. It’s something that, though testing, must be endured, with each song seeming to strip off a successive layer until the core lies quiet, serene, exposed. ‘Paralytic Stalks’ is a record that needs to be accepted as a whole – or not at all. “It’s just like a movie – you don’t want to just come in at random points in a movie. It definitely has that quality to it” Barnes explains. “If I just listen to it half way and then stop, it’s like an unfulfilling experience. It can actually leave you in a weird state of mind. If you listen to it to the very end I’ve found that there’s a revolution which occurs at the end, if you’ve made it all the way through: somehow – at least for me – I find some peace. If I don’t get all the way through I feel agitated, left in a strange state of mind.”
Drawing on wells of self-hatred and other painfully personal areas of Barnes’ own life, ‘Paralytic Stalks’ is confessional in nature. During the interview the songwriter shies away from any discussions about his own life and the background to the lyrics, which tend to stand on their own as blunt, chaotic vignettes of emotional terror. Insisting on a sense of directness throughout, Kevin Barnes demanded that of Montreal forge a connection with the listener. “We’ve done so much abstract material I feel that we’ve almost cracked the code – if you want to appear intelligent there’s almost a set way in which you can do it. So it’s not really that much of a challenge to appear mysterious – I want to be honest, I want to connect with people” he insists.
Asked if he has succeeded in this, the songwriter sighs and takes a quick breath: “I think so. I feel good about it because it’s a very honest statement, it’s very raw. I think, I hope that it serves the purpose that other records have served for me – records like the Plastic Ono Band, certain records you can think of.. Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake records, which seem like more personal, and more intimate. You – as a human being – if you listen to them when you’re in that state of mind as well you don’t feel as crazy, you don’t feel as fucked up as those other people who are in there with you.”
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‘Paralytic Stalks’ is out now.
Photo Credit: Patrick Heagney
