I Feel Safe with You, Trash

Album review

This seventeenth album by the still-prolific band from Athens, Georgia (just like R. E. M.) which Kevin Barnes has led since 1997, includes no fewer than twenty tracks. Soaring, psychedelic, and some might say crazy, Of Montreal's music is all of this, but what's more, it is profoundly unique. It's as if Frank Zappa had a son who preferred pop to jazz and other experimental improvisations. Because with Barnes, in spite of everything, you always end up finding your way back to pop music, even if it's sometimes malformed, twisted, and steeped in rock and electronica. It's also fair to speak of a pop format because the songs very rarely exceed five minutes in duration, most often clocking in at two or three minutes. Kevin Barnes is having fun with the echoes of his voice, multiplying them to create a charming kaleidoscopic effect which packs a punch and paradoxically sums up his music. Here, it starts from the first piece, Carton Aesthesis (o Portão), a ditty that hovers over a gravelly rhythm. Of Montreal has an artful way of choosing titles that flirt with the surreal. Thus we get Aries Equals Good Trash, Japanese Word for Witch, Fuckheads Is the Auto-correction, Fingerless Gloves, Kcrraanggaanngg!! not to mention Karlheinz Chop up Children... We dare not imagine what is going on in Kevin Barnes's head... On Aries Equals Good Trash, we are also reminded of Prince's high-pitched vocals, or of Lennon, when Barnes ecstatically breathes "eternal joy". A feeling of happiness suffuses the album, with emotions running in all directions, rollercoasters careering through all different styles, flying from the goofy discoesque  True Beauty Forever and landing elegantly on the funk guitar of Fuckheads Is the Auto-correction... We then move into a parallel world floating among the distended vocals of the title track, I Feel Safe with You, Trash. The journey continues through other soundscapes, distorting reality... Equatorial Hemorrhage Is a Dead Link, Yamagata Forest Flutes, and an African guitar on Thram Rammaged À Man-mod ... A real spatio-sensory trip that takes us far out of the comfort zones into which so-called popular music is so often siloed these days. © Yan Céh/Qobuz