Lost in all the recent hubbub is the fact that in early October Athens, GA’s Of Montreal released their 12th studio album entitled Lousy With Sylvianbriar that is a superb return to form.  Leader Kevin Barnes is never afraid to take chances and scads of stylistic turns, and along the way the last couple Of Montreal albums just didn’t strike our fancy.   Lousy With Sylvianbriar has changed all that and is now stuck on repeat at Chez Lefort, and we just can’t get enough.  Of Montreal recently checked in at KCRW and performed our favorite song off the new album, She Ain’t Speakin’ Now.  We’ll have more about the entire album later, but in the interim watch/listen below to Barnes‘ great vocal meld of Dylan, Bowie and T-Rex’s Marc Bolan on the song, not to mention the sweet harmonizing with his bandmate Rebecca Cash.  Barnes had the following to say about the song in the Track-by-Track article Under The Radar did for the album:

“She Ain’t Speakin’ Now”

Kevin Barnes: I came back from San Francisco, and my wife Nina and my daughter were both really sick. They both had this terrible flu. Nina came out to visit me for a weekend, and she had the misfortune of sitting next to this woman that was terribly sick and had no business flying. She was coughing and sneezing and leaving dirty tissues all over the place. She was really a monster in a way. But [Nina] got really ill, and it’s always scary, with people dying of the flu and all the different mutations that happen. There’s always that fear of a flu pandemic, and you never know when someone gets sick and bedridden if this is going to be the thing that actually kills someone. It’s a serious thing. So when I wrote that song, they were both really sick. I had this sense that they weren’t going to die, but I allowed myself to go to that really dark place, like “What if they did die?” That one, the verses are really beautiful, with Bennett [Lewis]’s mandolin, and I was playing this nylon-string guitar, and JoJo [Glidewell] was playing a really beautiful piano part. I like it a lot because it feels so different from verse to chorus. The verses feel more dreamy and beautiful, and the chorus is more frantic and fuzzy and rocking. I like the way the harmonies sound with me and Rebecca [Cash] on the choruses. That one was something I was thinking could be a good single.

Check out the performance below and watch or listen to the full KCRW session HERE.

The band is out on tour in support of the album (we of course missed this week’s show at Largo in LA) and will play UCSB’s Hub on January 24th.  All tour dates can be found HERE.