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Aureate Gloom

by of Montreal

supported by
Ben Collins
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Ben Collins the strings on this song fill me up Favorite track: Estocadas.
Karl Snyder
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Karl Snyder An often overlooked entry in an extremely prolific band's eclectic catalog, this is one of my favorites from Of Montreal. It takes the calm of Lousy with Sylvianbriar and blends it with the more hysteric sounds of False Priest. The result is balanced and thoroughly enjoyable. Favorite track: Empyrean Abattoir.
Andrew J Kobularcik
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Andrew J Kobularcik Thank something for this band!!! Flipping amazing as always!!! Dustin Hoffman would be proud!!!
Graham Almond
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Graham Almond They're great. It's not as good as the last one, but very few records in Pop Music History have been. Favorite track: Estocadas.
Ben Ricketts
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Ben Ricketts This is my favorite recent oM record, and it is one of my favorites to revisit out of their entire catalog. Kevin's melodic genius marries his 70s art rock influences more than ever on this album. Favorite track: Virgilian Lots.
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1.
they killed our electric guitars and if not for the good people weeping all we'd hear is sounds of our horses dying but i'm not bout to start crying about it it must be fairly normal to devolve into cycloptic brooding as the genocidal massacres erupt over some perceived sedition, insecurities of men messing everything up again all us charmed proteins feral in the gales only i have never followed no kind of master's voice the mutinous tramp of cult voltage crucifixion is my conduit i just watched my hero fail now i'm in a dark and violent funk every leader is a cellophane punk, if you hear me say yeah! yeah! yeah! yeah! there must be a softer vision that you could kick to in this aureate gloom i assume both sides are embarrassingly backwards in their thinking there aint no one to side with none i'd want not defend it's only the mute minded surge of simian blood people disappear on the wrong side of this revolution when they resurface there's a black hole in their skull people disappear on the wrong side of this revolution when they're returned all their childhood memories are dead i have never followed no kind of master's voice the mutinous tramp of cult vulture crucifixion is my conduit i just watched my hero fail now i'm in a dark and violent funk every leader is a cellophane punk, if you hear me say yeah! yeah! yeah! yeah! i have never followed no kind of master's voice the mutinous tramp of cult voltage crucifixion is my conduit i just watched my hero fail now i'm in a dark and violent funk every leader is a cellophane punk, if you hear me say yeah! yeah! yeah! yeah! i believe in witches i believe in you
2.
other people can be so disappointing, i need to spend more time alone what gives us the right to be so depressing, 224 west 16th street was our cathedral these tears i cry for you must prove that i'm not the demon that i'm meant to be you say you love me though just like you i'm too shady, knowing what you know it must be hard to trust someone who's so similar to yourself don't you know it's pointless to try and bully me into caring more, it's through no fault of your own it's really just the boredom of being someone's captive these tears i cry for you must prove that i'm not the demon that i'm meant to be drinking at the Jane Hotel till it was overrun by terrible people we heard them say his name from the train as usual eyes dead from anti-anxiety meds and the old gang grasping for air that's not there seeking out my own authentic season in hell though it doesn't feel quite as pompous least not as i can tell the misery loop that you sent me on it wrecked me for other summers but now that i am free and almost alone down in Chelsea i feel better why would you ask why should you care how i am doing? do i bother you with those kinds of vapid questions anymore? i wanna matter "i wanna be your friend" not a poison, this kind of love, our kind of love is so demoralizing
3.
winter isn't much here just a flinching centigrade though the grasses all look jaundiced and the poplar branches flayed oh the poplar branches flayed before your hysterical silence you came rapping at my door with your body as a sacrament your mind a killing floor oh your mind a killing floor i've been trying to quell my anger and not feel bitter about all the darkness you gave but as always there's that device that i cannot disengage just as a red terror you tried to kill what you couldn't reign and now you're back in Knoxville masturbating your father's pain oh masturbating your father's pain stealing from his oration of filth i repeat the wickedness to force reactions out of you but it never hurts as deeply as i want it to think i'll mix my medicine and explore it till i'm dull, you've made my sky a graveyard and my moon a funeral oh my moon a funeral now it's just a system of subtraction, i won't even turn around to notice your reaction now it's just a system of subtraction, i won't even feel the hateful vibing of your faction now it's just a system of subtraction, what ever happened to your star? now no one cares who you are now you were once beloved by my people now it's bad luck to even say your name when i see you it feels so awkward i try to be cool but it's such a drag i waited for you on O'Farrell street smelling other people's piss how could you think you seen me backwards babe? you ain't even seen the blikk fang babe, it's not acrimonious now it's only systems of subtraction, i won't even turn around to look at your reaction now it's just a system of subtraction, what ever happened to your star now no one cares who you are you used to share my broken throne now you sing flat alone
4.
troubled dreams troubled dreams i've been cursed by troubled dreams i've been hurt by troubled dreams troubled dreams troubled dreams i've been worked on by troubled dreams i've been hurt by troubled dreams you can't let them hear what you're thinking or they will throw you back into jail an aluminum crown it could scramble their gear if you keep it on while you are sleeping oh now that you're a threat to them they want to wire-tap your nerves they want to drive you mad with inner-oculi surveillance and sub-cognitive harassment troubled dreams troubled dreams i've been cursed by troubled dreams i've been haunted by troubled dreams troubled dreams troubled dreams i've been worked on by troubled dreams i've been hurt by troubled dreams
5.
the pigs are taking shots at the mourners on the hill, i'm truly not neutral but i lost all direction the day i awoke ready to blow the bridge but finding you hand over your mouth so instead i burned my own village down i'm grieving for you my love and i don't understand what's going on just as the twin volcanoes of Quauhnahuac we were once fabled, so sad i must bury every thought of you before it shows its teeth now i amuse myself with a dubious form of Virgilian Lots, like your neo-feminist divinations i'm grieving for you my love and i don't understand what's going on all my memories once almost sacred are embarrassments to me now of the three things i find most shocking the first is how trivial you are the second is my depth of feeling, third the purity of our collapse grieving for you my love and i don't understand what's going on
6.
there are no blood hunger parasites on his side of the mirror but on my side it's getting bleak our words are so much louder now that we almost never speak outside i'm desert inside i'm howling no you never did me wrong we've just been together too long babe go deeply he said go silently he said i think i'm pinging in the dead of sky cause my cocoon is threaded in soft metals if you'd absorb the mountain you could join me there we'll both be ugly failures and we won't even care outside i'm desert inside i'm howling we were the raping of the embryonic virgin spring, no fun out of that state i can only bury the statues cause the dead have already been eaten, threw a rock punctured the skull of the sea started a freeze out again i picture you a waif on a pacific break where the yawning void of your childhood sorrows can't haunt you and along my miserable returns hating myself like i know that you want me to do but there was always the Passion of Saint Matthew in my head to say she knows me, what do you know? should we endeavor to hate each other just to feel like we're moving pieces? i know that i will always need to possess you in the abstract in mock celebration of our centipede plague raving we set the stables into porphyrian flames you can turn on me but then you must expect the same, i'm not a different man cause you now call me by some fucked up name there is no sympathy for the ox or the brutal wars that we don't even bother naming just as our victimless suicides the future is a poseur and i'm drenched in glass
7.
on a drunk with dark globe and doom invocations of somebody's doped demon brother, the opiate drone of her gaze the anodyne days the cracked bas-relief of Hellenic summer the cabalic kilo i know that she's only trying to score and not very human anymore the loom has gone lame, the pattern's insane, the agents have wigged out the pulse is corrupt, La Chota's a blank, no function we seven of the Aegean sleep deprivation experiment stumbling around Monastiraki Square crawling to her in my undress my heart is a mess, the ruins depress, the shrill of our withering depths, the din is intense i sense that she's finally turned the lock but i just want my Anatolian Rock i've been through so many deaths that i don't know which name to answer to, fidelity breeds madness, i trashed the heights, the peak and now i'm on my own, no violence on the telephone, you're a child of neglect but you turned out ok the way my psyche rioted i was just as shot, your new lover like a hearse our Iliad of failure i recoil at the sound, the milking of vipers onto the barren dirt and just past the orchards lurking beneath the Hyades, satins of vicious YaYo societies i can't get no rest, my dreams are corrosive, nightmares scalp empires too, my thoughts are voltaic, i'm such a downer, huh? and now i'm on my own, no violence on the telephone, you're a child of neglect but you turned out ok the way my psyche rioted i was just as shot, you're new lover like a hearse our Iliad of failure
8.
Estocadas 04:20
the natives have a name for me but i can't remember what it is, some fucker took what's mine now he's acting like she's his your shifty friend gave you a cactus for a gift such a stupid offering, what's it meant to symbolize, a hostile immobility? is that something to prize? the floodlights and generator hum render sleeping some myth of men the morning finds me lying with my face pressed to the glass door this summer's been nothing but rain, nature is writhing in her own filth again we took the bus to Plaza de Toros on a dare, you cried all through the bullfight and cursed me for taking you there riding back in silence to the hostel thinking only of the estocadas the morning finds me lying with my face pressed to the glass door this summer's been nothing but rain, nature is writhing in her own filth again
9.
raw unnatural vaqueros with their wild minded apotropaic pisces executing holographic sadists among the pecan sign of the horn to the bitchin' Falconvein exploding silver acetylene flares
10.
the music stopped and i awoke i can laugh at myself if i get the joke, somebody is paying attention and not coping well with all the concrete he ruined you without a single intelligent word, sometimes you get the punishment that somebody else deserved but a man must have his conquests to keep his spirits high and i… and i heard you whimpering from behind the red curtain, i just rolled my eyes and went back to my book, i realized then,if ever there was something alive in you, something i could love, that thing must now be dead i asked if i could come visit her in her living grave, the place where she and her circumstantial husband stay, to whisk her away or at least shake things up but who am i to break up an unhappy home? and you, you said you wanted to murder your rabbit heart, well you mustn't it's the part of you that i love the best

about

“A golden despondency” is how Kevin Barnes translates the meaning behind Aureate Gloom, the title he gave of Montreal’s thirteenth full-length album.

The oxymoron is one Barnes says best describes the overall state of his life and mental outlook while working on the record: first on a writing retreat in New York City, then while demoing tracks in Athens, before finally recording at Sonic Ranch, just across the border from Juarez, Mexico in the Texan desert.

If you’re wondering what exactly would lead Barnes to use this epithet to describe his reality at the time, look no further than the songs themselves.

While many bands rely on vague platitudes as an attempt to make their songs universally applicable, Barnes chooses to take the opposite tact — penning lyrics so personal they sound like entries ripped from a journal that should be permanently kept under lock and key.

“I was going through a very stormy period in my life and felt like I was just completely trashed,” reveals Barnes. “I might be guilty of sharing or exposing too much of my private life, but to me the best albums are those that help people connect with an artist on a deep, human level and that do so without too much artifice or evasiveness.”

For inspiration — and to put a bit of distance between himself and the events and people he writes so unequivocally about — Barnes spent two weeks in New York City this past spring.

While there, he wandered around Chelsea, Greenwich Village, SoHo, and Chinatown, imagining what it was like 40 years ago, picturing himself as Tom Verlaine or Patti Smith, or James Chance.

Lead single “Bassem Sabry” (named for the Egyptian journalist who died tragically in the spring of 2014), is perhaps of Montreal’s most political song to date, with Barnes proclaiming “Every leader is a cellophane punk,” while handclaps and danceable drums incite the listener to follow his command: “If you hear me, say ‘Yeah!’ ‘Yeah!’ ‘Yeah!’”

The energy remains high for “Last Rites At The Jane Hotel,” which channels Barnes innermost T. Rex while staying true to of Montreal's signature kaleidoscopic song structure.

“Empyrean Abattoir” begins dark and brooding before unfurling into a revved up Television-inspired outro, as all the while Barnes lays bare his most gut-wrenching lyrics.

Closing track “Like Ashoka’s Inferno Of Memory” ends the record on an appropriately epic note, reveling in its seemingly effortless shifting of tempos and tones — a microcosm, really, of the overall album’s auditory audaciousness.

Like 2013’s Lousy with Sylvianbriar, Aureate Gloom was recorded directly to tape with musicians Kevin Barnes (guitar, vocals), Clayton Rychlik (drums), Bob Parins (bass), Bennett Lewis (guitar), and JoJo Glidewell (keys), plus the help of engineer Drew Vandenberg.

Having already spent many of the previous months touring together, the strength of the members’ musical rapport was instantly apparent. The group completed nearly a song a day during their stay in the desert and even wrote a brand new track on the spot, “Apollyon Of Blue Room,” whose title references a supposedly haunted bedroom in a hacienda on the studio grounds.

Working at such a breakneck pace, there was no time to nitpick, to dissect, to overanalyze. Only later, upon arriving back home, was Barnes able to take a step back and fully appreciate what he and his band had accomplished.

With Aureate Gloom, of Montreal have created one of the most unflinching, confessional and starkly emotional albums in their oeuvre.

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released March 3, 2015

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