Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

I've listened to this album by Of Montreal twice now and I'm not sure what I think. It's a pleasant enough listen, with some good dance beats, but I don't dance. There is no lyric sheet, so I'm not sure what's going on, but the titles of the songs are so vivid they are irresistible. The band, which is apparently one guy, Kevin Barnes, reminds me of the glam-rock of the early seventies, with some Peter Gabriel-era Genesis thrown in. The music doesn't particularly grab me hard, though, or hit me on a gut level.

Reading about the album on Wikipedia, I see that the songs are about a transformation of the singer into an alter-ego called "Georgie Fruit." This recalls the alter-egos of David Bowie, particularly Ziggy Stardust. But while Bowie's work had some gravitas, Of Montreal's sound is gossamer, and threatens to drift away while listening.

But back to the song titles. They are like poems unto themselves: "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethenian Curse," "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger," "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" (which clocks in at almost twelve minutes, and has a great driving rhythm), "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider," which has my favorite line of the album, "You're just a faggy girl, I need a lover with real soul power." Then comes "Faberge Falls for Shuggie" and "We Were Born the Mutants Again With Leafling."

In seeing pictures of Barnes, I can see that he is probably influenced by Bowie and Gabriel, as he is given to theatricality and a fey persona. I probably won't end up listening to this album much as time goes by, as it just seems a hard nut to crack and I'm not sure there's a lot of meat inside.