False Priest

The most enticing aspects of the band's R&B are the places where it deviates from the recipe: its acidic, self-loathing undercurrent, its sugar-high unpredictability.

False Priest is certainly a notable step-up from Skeletal Lamping, the release where Barnes lost me as a fan. False Priest doesn’t do enough to reel folks like me back into the hype machine, mainly because the lyrics are simply too dense and abstract to enjoy in this setting.

An inventive, richly melodic and generally superb-sounding record that finally permits the listener to sit back and enjoy Barnes' black Seventies influences, yet falling a little short of its two predecessors by dint of lacking their cohesion and emotional weight.

Of Montreal's 2007 album, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, is one of the best 'breakdown' albums ever. In a reversal of most artistic endeavours, the more self-indulgent and navel-gazing singer-songwriter Kevin Barnes' writing became, the more inclusive and enjoyable the album proved as a listening experience. The follow-up, 2008's Skeletal Lamping, took the funky rhythms and sex-fixated lyrics of Hissing Fauna and screwed them up into a knotty, continuous song cycle. It proved mostly successful, although even Skeletal Lamping's most avid fans are unlikely to listen to it regularly.