Innocence Reaches works best when it offers surprises after seducing with slinky bass lines and sleepy bloops and bleeps.
Innocence Reaches takes another mercurial swerve, with synths back in favour and flamboyance reembraced. The results flit capriciously and deliciously through tones and genres.
Throughout the album's 12 tracks, of Montreal manage to come off inspired, inventive, re-energized and wide-eyed on Innocence Reaches, utilizing new sounds rather than rehashing old ideas.
Innocence Reaches feels like Barnes has found his center again. This time out he’s figured out how to combine his melodic skills with his musical idiosyncrasies in a way that works, for the most part, really well.
Though Innocence Reaches is more than a bit disjointed, offering a mix of styles previously explored and newly absorbed, it's an uptempo pleaser with songs that promise to be handpicked fan favorites -- albeit with little consensus.
There is plenty of evidence of Barnes’ debt to David Bowie and Prince all over Innocence Reaches, but this time he’s focused primarily on floor-filling EDM.
of Montreal’s most recent effort does well to offer listeners a varied and well-balanced sampling of the band’s myriad of amassed musical flavours, with contemporary EDM coming as the latest addition.
You might sometimes wish Barnes would curb his more outlandish impulses; when focused, he is a fine songwriter.
Challenging and proudly disjointed, Innocence Reaches showcases a deranged songwriter whose fickle character knows no bounds.
Innocence Reaches is lighter than last year’s appropriately titled Aureate Gloom, but it’s less fun than it thinks it is, and in pursuing a more “current,” electronic-inspired sound, it’s lost the psychedelic charms of a better post-peak Of Montreal album like, say, 2013’s lousy with sylvianbriar.
Atlanta indie veterans of Montreal continue a weak album streak with Innocence Reaches.
#91 | / | Under the Radar |