The chrysalis is breaking and the superego's waking: Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins

(Note: I wrote about this album for my 2000s music series in 2019, where it checked in at #6. I did my best to not repeat myself too much, or at least, when I had to, to expand on my original thoughts.)

This weekend, my wife and I went to see Of Montreal live playing The Sunlandic Twins on their tour for the album’s 20th anniversary.

The very first time I saw the band was, indeed, 20 summers ago. I was not at all knowledgeable of them; my new roommate, who I’d quickly become friends with, was the promotions director at our college radio station, and he convinced me to go with him. We saw the band at Mary Jane’s Fat Cat, a long-closed venue on Houston’s long-since-gentrified Washington Street. They were touring for their recently-released seventh album The Sunlandic Twins, and the show hooked me, particularly the immediately catchy “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games.” I went ahead and got the album, and further listening really deepened its place in my life, as it spoke to ways I maybe didn’t quite understand then but instinctively felt.

I think I understand better now. And I can say that, seeing it again 20 years later, it hasn’t left that place at all. I still had as much joy seeing the band live as I did then, maybe more so for having a deeper understand of this album’s place in my life– and certainly as I was more familiar with it than the first time, when I didn’t even really know who Of Montreal was.¹

Space travels in my blood, there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it…

-The Only Ones, “Another Girl, Another Planet”

That line is not from this album, but from an all-time power-pop/pop-punk classic released all the way back in 1978, but I can’t explain why this album speaks to me better than this. Of Montreal’s previously established psych-pop takes on an interstellar nature on this album, one that mirrored the metaphorical journey into space I was on at the time, call it one of ascension or enlightenment or just another young fool thinking the secrets of the universe could be unlocked if he could just find the key. A search for transcendence, maybe, one that found resonance in the sound of The Sunlandic Twins and the space-bound metaphors of the Only Ones².

The album is poppy, catchy, and danceable, for its space-psych elements, and I feel like I should mention that because I’m not sure how much I’ll get around to the actual sound of the album in the rest of the article. A lot of people prefer their next few albums– 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? in particular was widely praised for its darker turns, its more explicit funk, and Barnes’ development of a new persona– but for me, this is the album where our paths intersected, where I saw my own spiritual journey reflected in the album³ (and, well, I prefer the band’s poppier sound to its darker sound).

Seeing the show live helped me understand and break down the structure of the album better. It is that journey into space, but that’s only half the story. Eventually, you come back down.⁴

Part I: Going Up

At the time of writing and recording the album, Kevin Barnes was recently married and his wife Nina had a baby on the way. Perhaps that’s why the album starts with a look back at a past relationship in “Requiem for O.M.M.2,”⁵ although the opening lines really give the sense of the album as a lifelong journey– “When I met you I was just a kid / hadn’t built up my defenses / so I gave my heart completely / Vaseline over the lenses.”

Ultimately, it’s about a relationship that he has strong memories of and wonders about, but that he knows he had to leave behind to move on with his life. Also, it’s catchy as hell.

For me, those opening lines spoke to a childlike innocence I rarely had and, on my journey, was trying to rediscover.

When I said “lifelong journey,” that is buoyed by second track “I Was Never Young,” which also immediately spoke to me. “I was never young, even as a child.” Part of that was because I had adult-level interests even at a young age; part of that is because I was brought up in a world that didn’t leave a lot of room for innocence or gentleness, or even to treat children like they were people. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a brooding basket case” probably comes from that second part.

“Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games” might be Of Montreal’s most recognizable song, if for no other reason than the melody being used in an Outback Steakhouse commercial. The references to ancient and medieval tales and folklore like the Satyr in Cyprus and Tristan and Iseult would be a recurring theme Barnes returns to on this album, although the groovy chorus is what most people remember: “Let’s pretend we don’t exist / Let’s pretend we’re in Antarctica.”

I didn’t want to not exist, but playing new roles, to “forget who, forget what, forget where,” to lose identity, label, that appealed to me. Let’s strip the names, the attachments, everything away but our true presences. I didn’t want a name, a label, anything tying me to the material world; I wanted to be a ghost, a spirit growing until its love and peace surrounded all. Even my body was just a vehicle to grow my soul, a vehicle I thought I might leave behind once I’d attained true presence, true enlightenment. And the bridge’s fantasy of growing younger and never dying… well, if our presence is eternal, we can never really die, can we? (We’ll revisit the themes of eternity and immortality later.)

Perhaps I should have taken more warning from the next track. “Forecast Fascist Future” is an unfortunately prescient title 20 years down the road. Its possible references to the Holocaust and Mussolini’s Italy escaped me at the time, because they’re so veiled they may not even be that, but also I never was good at picking up the lyrics of the verses to this one. (I would have at least picked up the reference to “a drowning in Styx” if I’d been able to make out the lyrics.) What I did pick up on was the chorus; “Boredom murders the heart of our age while sanguinary creeps take the stage” now seems more relevant than ever, with billionaires dismantling the very structures of a functioning society and the one that made them rich in the first place, seemingly out of boredom and lack of any existential struggle as much as anything.

And then there’s the outro: “May we never go, go mental / May we always stay, stay gentle.” That spoke to me, as someone with a big heart and a big brain who had to make sure the latter didn’t dominate the former, that fear and ego and thinking didn’t cloud my ability to follow my heart. (Especially since you don’t find enlightenment through ration or reason.)

Kevin and Nina Barnes’ daughter Alabee was born around the time of the album’s release, and she lends her name to “So Begins Our Alabee.” The references to Petrarch and Dido I did recognize; perhaps I myself was a “gloomy Petrarch” in my day as well. (Did I have a mousy aesthete and buoyant cherub? Maybe. Although if I did, I didn’t let them in enough. Maybe I ended up being the “little friend, the abject failure” for that reason.)

The building “And so begins, begins our odyssey” was probably Barnes writing about his new family, but to me, it was exactly what I was feeling, the journey I saw myself on, not knowing where it would take me. “The boyish voice is leaving” – does that mean my innocence is leaving? Do I need to catch up with it and go where it’s going? Or something else? “The chrysalis is breaking and the superego’s waking” – I’m not sure if it was “superego” in my case, but I really believed I was on the path to something, whether enlightenment or perfect self-knowledge or leaving the Matrix or something else. And the building momentum of the chant leading into the choruses, the emotional crescendo that wrapped up the first section of the album, reflected what I was feeling, that I was going somewhere, on a rare and magical journey, mainlining the secret truth of the universe.

Part II: Peaking

Then, on the sixth track, is the first of three instrumentals on the album, “Our Spring Is Sweet Not Fleeting.” A brief, playful interlude, a break between two centerpiece songs on the album. Maybe this symbolized the peace and simple joy I was hoping to find. Maybe that’s giving me too much credit, since I didn’t really know what I hoped to find, I just knew I was being pulled by some force inside me responding to the universe and simply seeing where it took me. Maybe it’s really just a chance to catch our breath after the intensity of “So Begins Our Alabee” and before what’s about to happen.

If it was that moment of peace and was not meant to be fleeting (even 1:02 can feel like forever under the right circumstances), and the song paralleled that in my own journey, well… the album, and my life, continued.

---

Coming at the exact midpoint of the album, “The Party’s Crashing Us” is really on the surface just an excitable love/dance song, with some incredible harmony-driven melodies and funky riffs. And the title is probably just a clever inversion of crashing the party, about partying too hard.

But to me… trying to see the truth behind the illusion and figure it out before the system could catch on to me and rewrite itself… “The Party” brought to mind 1984, and “Crashing Us” brought to mind The Matrix, a “crash” like a computer system, and “us” like Winston and Julia– perhaps a warning, perhaps a sense that all this must remain secret from the panopticon. Perhaps guided by lines like “I want to grab you and just kiss you / Maybe I should come down / No sense in cashing us now.” They had to hide their true intentions lest the Party, the System, noticed. Truth in secret, in subtleties and double meanings, only for those with the eyes and ears to see and hear beyond the surface, those on the same wavelength and perceiving the same hidden reality.

That’s what I felt like I was doing, too– technically having one face to the world while on my secret mission. I was taking classes, DJing at the college radio station, enough markers of an ordinary life (and, eventually, leaving my job to play poker full-time)… while I was also in my free time digging into unraveling the secrets of reality and trying to see clearly to the truth. Those “Neptunian blues that eyes forgot”? I may have even seen ’em a few times, sometimes in sparks and auras in others, once as clear as day to myself. T.S. Eliot called it “the heart of the light, the silence.” And I knew it was real because in a world with as much background noise and radiation as ours, true silence is a nearly impossible thing.

But perhaps the System was onto me already. I never made that final step. I couldn’t shed the ego when the window opened; I couldn’t shed my fear. And there was no second chance. I only had to live with the knowledge that I saw the Way come to an end and failed to change. And for a long time, I felt lost afterward, and my attempts to find meaning again brought about disaster for me, a nearly-fatal lesson in misplaced trust.

Maybe, just like Winston or Neo, the System knew I was going to do this all along, and this attempt to break out was simply my place in it.

Or maybe it had all been in my head. Who knows?

Eventually, I figured out how to live in the world again, though it took years for that to feel real, and not like a strange dream I was waiting to wake up from. That time getting from rock bottom to no longer feeling like a ghost feels fuzzy now, faint memories where I even still have them. I moved around a lot, perhaps looking for a change of circumstances when what I really needed was internal healing.

And I danced.

I only feel all right when the VU is flashing.

---

After “The Party’s Crashing Us,” the pace of the album slows down, and the next track is the second instrumental, “Knight Rider.” I have no idea if the song was in fact inspired by the show, but I feel like it could’ve fit on there (much like I feel Alan Braxe and Fred Falke’s “Rubicon” could have fit on Miami Vice). In my metaphor for this album, “Knight Rider” is the sound of cruising altitude. You’ve gotten as high as you’re going to go; we’re going to maintain this for a little while before you come back to Earth. Maybe, even, “Knight Rider” provides a smooth runway for the descent.

It’s not a bad metaphor for any number of trips, not just mine.

Part III: Coming Down

Looking back, that fear and sense of being lost I felt, missing my opportunity and being trapped, is reflected in the lyrics to “I Was a Landscape in Your Dream.” “What kind of comedy is this? How can you say now, you’re frightened?” Well, I definitely was, and I wasn’t laughing; everything felt empty and meaningless, like I’d missed the one thing I’d been pursuing and all the pursuit had showed me is how hollow and illusory everything else was. “What kind of labyrinth is this that we’re constructing through talking?” I’d seen the power of words and the illusions they could create; the truth found from stripping labels and identities gets its photo-negative here, the lies and illusions constructed through words. “What kind of labyrinth is this that sends you laughing without smiling?” Laughing without smiling is a sign of some form of madness. Maybe what I’d sought drove me mad. I wasn’t smiling.

“Death of a Shade of a Hue” has few lyrics, but the “memory imprints of her favorite day” were all I had to cling to at this point. “For a minute, I stayed watching this brilliant display / Until a god with a broom came and swept them away.” Maybe that’s what I’d been doing; too fearful to act, just watching. And perhaps it was time to “set off to find a less trite identity.”

“Oslo in the Summertime” is the first truly Earth-bound song here, in a specific time and place on the planet. (Kevin’s wife Nina is from Norway, so I imagine it’s written about his times visiting her there.) Norway might well be the “Sunland” of the title, a little play on Iceland and on how long the sun is up during the summer. And even though I’ve never been, my own lost and confused self after the peak might well have been the person referred to in “Just tell the American not to stare.” In a more literal sense, it’s a nice follow-up to Kevin Barnes’ European adventures as documented in Satanic Panic in the Attic‘s “My British Tour Diary.”

“October Is Eternal” brings back the theme of eternity in its title, and I don’t know what Barnes meant by the title– the song is the album’s third instrumental, so there’s no hope of finding meaning in the lyrics here, although maybe it’s the inverse of “Our Spring Is Sweet Not Fleeting,” October being in the fall and all. It had its own meaning to me, though. My brother was born in October, and our relationship was, to put it mildly, fraught. We weren’t speaking at the time of his 30th birthday 20 years ago, although, to be clear, that is his fault. I don’t need to go into specifics, but the incident that caused him to snap and attempt to discard me was, simply, standing up to him and putting my foot down to all his bullshit, bullying, cruelty, and arguably psychotic behavior. On my birthday, funnily enough. My journey began in large part with leaving him behind and the cloud he cast over my mind and my life. An “eternity” no one would want to spend.⁶

But perhaps I could never really escape, and that title was the reminder. After everything I went through, he came back. No apologies. Things got a little better, never great; he was and is still remarkably capable of casual cruelty. Now? I don’t know. But about three years ago I decided I’d had enough of being the only one to try. Maybe I’ll see him on his 50th this year, if he remembers he has a brother to reach out to for whatever he’s planning on doing. And if he cares that he does.

But, hey, my wife was born in October, too, and though I didn’t know that then, maybe that’s the real Eternal here. Maybe– like Kevin and Nina Barnes– the two of us are the real Sunlandic Twins, the Repudiated Immortals.⁷ (The fact that Of Montreal was one of the first bands we bonded over and saw together might be evidence to this.)

“The Repudiated Immortals” perhaps throws back to “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games”– maybe Barnes’ narrator and his lover never did die, but maybe the heaviness of that is weighing on them. (That’s actually pretty explicit in the lyrics.) “The creator of what’s now cliché / Wants us little things to cry and feel alone,” definitely captured how I felt in the weeks and months after my failure to launch. The world felt hollow, everything cliché and pointless– surely I wasn’t the only real thing, right? What if I was? How sad and lonely would that be?

But even though it took me a good two and a half years to find myself again, even though a huge chunk of my mid-twenties is one long lost weekend, I did eventually, and I picked up the pieces and started from scratch, started growing into the person I wanted to be. And the chorus that closes the album speaks to that:

But don’t, don’t lose hope, no, no, no, no
No, no, no don’t feel sad ’cause it’s a violent world
But there’s still beauty
I’ll take care of you if you take care of me

I did lose hope for a while, but I managed to find it again, to accept my place in the world as best as I could, and let rivers be rivers and mountains be mountains. And I try to find the beauty in it. Even though I never did escape Earth, or this dimension, or the universe, I survived the worst of what happened to me, and I won’t say it made me stronger, but for everything I lost, I did find myself in many ways. Who I am and what I want outside the influence or judgment of others, particularly people who don’t even really like me. The understanding that not wanting to hurt people doesn’t mean letting yourself get walked all over. The courage and sense of self-worth I had been lacking. I am in a world of shit, but I am alive, and I am not afraid.

And today, that last line in particular is what I try to remember. Even though I’ve cried and felt alone and felt sad in the violent world, it has been, for many years since the worst times in my life, my relationships that carry me through. The people I care for and who care for me. We are stronger together than we are alone. And when I felt at my loneliest, my most vulnerable, my most betrayed, I still found the people to carry me through those times, from my Dad, to the friends who were there for me 20 years ago and still are 20 years later, to the young woman who took an interest in me and I discovered an immediate connection with and who is still my wife 16 years later, to the family members I have who are kind and caring, to the many friends I’ve made along the way since then through various communities I’ve been part of, and the community I try to build among all of them. It is a violent world, but there’s still beauty, and the love we show each other may be its purest form.

I’ll take care of you if you take care of me.

---

Oh, yeah, and the album’s music is awesome, at turns poppy, funky, groovy, danceable, and always catchy and with a depth that rewards repeat listening. You will probably not have my connection to it or relate to my experience. But the music has plenty of its own merits to stand on even if you don’t.

1. Also, this was the seventh time I’ve seen Of Montreal life. I’m pretty sure that puts them in first place. ↩︎
2. Certainly more so than the actual likely metaphor of “Another Girl, Another Planet,” heroin. ↩︎
3. Admittedly, that journey involved a lot of drugs and Eastern religion. Still not heroin, though. ↩︎
4. I hadn’t come down when I discovered the album, but upon revisiting it today, I can see that structure and the reflection of my own path much more clearly. ↩︎
5. Still no idea what “O.M.M.2” stands for. ↩︎
6. I never did delete the meanest email I’ve ever received in my life, though. I don’t need to revisit it, but it might come in handy someday. Honestly, what he did leading up to that might have been worse. ↩︎
7. They ultimately divorced, although Kevin says they’re on good terms. Hopefully we don’t. ↩︎