A Blueprint For Gleeful Anarchy
Dustin Hoffman has most likely never eaten a bathtub. Nor has he probably thought about it, let alone felt the temptation to do so strongly enough that he would've had to actively resist it. He has almost certainly never had to explain the absence of a bathtub to an officer of the law. Why would these facts ever need to be pointed out? On a collection of early demos and song sketches, Kevin Barnes used his nascent Of Montreal moniker to push wild theories about Dustin Hoffman via his song titles. And yet, that is only a small part of what adds up to a brilliantly puerile exercise in playful iconoclasm.
In the late 90s, Kindercore Records began as a way to promote and document the strides of the Athens, GA music scene. Their stable of artists tended to be those in parallel evolution who had more of a "precious", or even "twee" sound. The label was a home or halfway house to many acts who went on to develop more followers in other scenes and sounds, bands like Dressy Bessy, Maserati, and Call and Response. One of the more notable names on Kindercore's list of alumni is Of Montreal, the act founded and led by Kevin Barnes.
Somewhere in the hazy, transitional time between Of Montreal's entry into the world via Kindercore and their eventual landing at Polyvinyl Records around 2004, Barnes and friends recorded batches of material onto four-track equipment. Sixteen of these songs comprise The Early Four Track Recordings compilation album. “Of Montreal”, as an identity, was still figuring out what it was, and that's clear from the muddy and unpolished nature of the work here. Even still, some things came through very clearly then, only crystallizing even more in the years since. While the band’s lifestyle brand was in embryonic stages, Barnes was sharpening ways to become a household name through tools that would become part of the band's trademark: excess, genre-jumping, and button-pushing.
This actually isn't an "album", in the formal sense. The songs are cobbled together from sessions over a period of months or years, and the recordings weren't originally meant to work toward one overarching vision. However, the attention paid to the collection during the refinement process is evident. Its visual design is of a piece, consistently creepy and colorful featuring drawings of children making uncanny faces and inanimate objects kaleidoscoping into themselves. Its song titles, as noted, relay a crazier-than-life story about Dustin Hoffman, his wife, his children, and some drama involving a bathtub, among other things. The titles' containment of a narrative in themselves is another sign of Barnes and co. adding an unexpected, but welcome, layer of meaning onto what may have otherwise been an eclectic and disconnected group of tunes.
The track list deserves some scrutiny with regards to what Of Montreal would become. While they are absurd and make a chuckle-worthy read, why would anyone go out of the way to poke fun at Dustin Hoffman? Hoffman was an actor that had been well-known nearly two decades at the time of this comp's assembly and release, and he had been respected since the beginning of his career. He certainly couldn't be a target of ridicule, right? Barnes suggests here in his good-natured ribbing that no celebrity is immune to getting a stick in the eye, even if it's only because they are famous. There is no ill will here, just the desire to get a reaction.
Sound-wise the tracks skip from disarmingly earnest indie pop to funereal dirges, from country western romping to jagged guitar sounds bleeding into dreamy breaks. Which is all to say that there is not a real "genre" here in any cohesive sense once one gets past the dirty sonics. As opposed to pop music created in a bedroom, it scans more like bedrooms being airlifted into honky-tonks and choral chambers; the form doesn’t dictate the function, as a rule.
There may not be a tangible through line from "Dustin Hoffman Gets a Bath" and its peppy Saturday-morning vibe that leads straight to the cracked-out space-disco chicanery of The Sunlandic Twins, but by reading between the lines here it's remarkably clear how the same artist was the driving force behind both products. Barnes screams to be unleashed in the ending yelp on "Dustin Hoffman Thinks About Eating the Soap": "I am a gift, why won't you open me?" The future would see his outsized stylistic force be finally matched by his in-studio options, and that would be all she wrote. Similarly, the austerity of the under-embellished "Dustin Hoffman's Wife Calls In Detective…" draws from the same aesthetic well that would bring us the subdued "nursing slopes" years later. The differences between the two works can easily be seen as only those resulting from time and opportunity.
Kevin Barnes knew that any journey of a thousand miles begins with the lacing up of a knee-high platform boot, and he did that work with his band of merry pranksters. Of Montreal would turn into a hurricane, blending chaos and identity fluidity into a molotov cocktail used to help explode establishmentarian conventions. The Early Four Track Recordings captures a moment in time, a surface layer of tropical water that would catalyze that storm into existence.
