#365songs (182 / 365)

I like midpoints. Especially in books, I love to reach some plot cataclysm that fundamentally changes the story, or upends what the characters (and/or the reader) thought they knew, and realize that I'm on page 235 of a 570-page book. (Paradoxically, I also think the one undeniable benefit of e-readers over physical books is that you can turn off page numbers altogether, so that you don't know how much is left in a book and thus how much time it has to wrap everything up — or not — but I digress.)

Anyway, I love when musicians do something with album midpoints too, and "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" is one of the biggest album-midpoint curveballs I know. Approximately smack in the middle of the otherwise peppy, catchy electro-pop-inflected Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, it's a structureless, oppressive, ominous cri de coeur that only flirts with melody for its 12-minute runtime but is still kind of catchy somehow. Kevin Barnes sings a series of seeming non-sequiturs, occasionally repeating a line either because it feels especially true or just because it's a great phrase or maybe just to fill time. It all feels very improvised, but who knows if it is. It's almost totally different from the rest of Hissing Fauna — except that it's still a Kevin Barnes song and Kevin Barnes can only ever sound like himself no matter what kind of crazy stylistic experiment he happens to be indulging in — and the album would be a very different (and, I would argue, lesser) thing without it.

I have to mention that another part of what makes "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" so structurally appealing to me is the (original? physical?) album art, which I've attached because it's different on Bandcamp. of Montreal albums of this era tended to be absolutely overwhelmingly riotously busy with color and intricate detail, and Hissing Fauna is no exception... but for the two black semicircles (cardboard flaps on the physical art, I think?) that encroach from top and bottom. "Reading" the album art left to right, they meet right at the middle. There's a darkness to all of Hissing Fauna, which is largely about the dissolution of Kevin Barnes's marriage, but "The Past is a Grotesque Animal" is where those black semicircles meet: it's where he manically gives himself over to his rage and self-loathing and despair entirely. But it is, somehow, I repeat, still kind of catchy.