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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 8, 2007)
BY JOSHUA BLANCHARD GET CAUGHT IN THE ACT! KARAOKE Thursday Nights 9pm-1am Retro Active Of Montreal’s full-grown pop music 3355 E. AMAZON • EUGENE • 686-5022 THE LANDMARK An Ocean view from every table 111 Hwy 101 in YACHATS • 541-547-5459 www.landmark-yachats.com Live at the Coast FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 9PM CHUCKBARRYMANILOW Reeotch and Tricky P add a few players and throw together a wierd stew SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 9PM Frankie Hernandez Band Soul, funk, Latin and reggae from Austin, Texas Fresh Fish/Italian - Authentic Oregon since 1911 32 FEBRUARY 8, 2007 F lover’s wet dream brimming with quirky side or something so apparently simple, tangents and Vaudevillian charm. A rush of re- putting your finger on what pop leases followed, most with long-winded titles music means in this day and age is like The Bird Who Continues to Eat the oddly challenging. Clearly “Top 40” means Rabbit’s Flower and Coquelicot something drastically different OF MONTREAL, Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety than what it once did. So what is THE BLOW of Whimsical Verse. Taking a pop music: the Beach Boys or 9pm • Sat. 2/10 nod from veteran storytellers Ashlee Simpson? Well crafted WOW Hall like the Kinks, the albums were three-minute sing-alongs or pre- $10 adv/$12 door littered with character studies of fab audio commercials for a Volunteer Firemen and Unusual Nuns, but un- celebrity’s new vanity project? To most, the derneath it all, Barnes’ often morbid fascina- golden era of pop is the fertile decade of the tions always kept his music just shy of light- 1960s, and rightly so, for at no other time in weight. modern history have the boundaries of music Well, time marches on, and with most expanded so much in so short a span of time. Elephant Six acts going the way of the dodo, All things move in cycles, and just as sky Of Montreal is one of the last bands standing. bound acid rock has gained renewed footing in Their latest album, Hissing Fauna, Are You the the 2000s, the previous decade found a resur- Destroyer?, finds real life seeping in through gence of fuzzy retro pop. The most imagina- the cracks of Barnes’ technicolor diorama. tive group of the era was Elephant Six, a loose Gone are the whimsical personalities that once collective of bands that included Neutral Milk inhabited his songs; in their stead are caustic Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control and, of course, reflections on lost love and isolation as the Of Montreal. In 1997, the quirky music com- songwriter copes with long periods of depres- munity of Athens, Georgia, was rippling with sion and a recent seperation from his wife and electricity, and Of Montreal’s mastermind, child. More power to him, though, because as Kevin Barnes, was one of its principal live our world grows more dark and complex by wires. From the onset, with the band’s debut the day, maybe it’s time for our pop music to album, Cherry Peel, Barnes’ machinations grow up a little bit too. had already taken shape: an Anglophile pop ew
