Boards
been listening to of Montreal a lot in the past few days
they're just better than any other indie band of the past ~40 years aren't they.
i think a lot of the problem with indie type music (especially yankee bullshit) is this constant effort to make the perfect album. probably the (self) mythologising of a 10.0 from Pitchfork has fed into that. but the problem is now bands won't dare take any risks. just look at the extended lengths between albums as Animal Collective have progressed through their career, or how long it has been since Telepathe's first album, or how Air France split up because after trying for several years they couldn't get any better.
you don't have any of that with of Montreal - it's idea after idea after idea after idea. Kevin Barnes realises that it's not about perfectly executing everything that comes into your head but realising it some way and then letting the listeners deal with it. hey, we combined the experimental orchestral music of edgar varese with the aesthetic of funkadelic. hey, sometimes we sound a bit like queen, prince and john cage put together. sometimes we just sound like XTC. but all the time we sound like of Montreal and all the time we sound like we've put our last album behind us and are moving on.