Of Montreal is a band that I have been listening intently to for about half a decade, but it feels like they have been a part of my life for even longer. As such, when it comes to new releases, I often take a hypercritical stance. When I saw them in concert earlier this year, touring with an untitled "new song" that was so incredibly auspicious that it made me think ''Innocence Reaches'' was going to be the best thing since "Skeletal Lamping," which, in turn, is the best thing since sliced bread.
A trend has surfaced among my personal reactions to their new releases, in which I instinctively reject the music on the first encounter, but eventually return with a reinvigorated hunger for a discography-shattering album. Sometimes I find exactly what I'm looking for, and sometimes, but admittedly fewer times, I do not. Where the mystery tour song ''Gratuitous Abysses'' was so brilliant I had to wear shades, the three singles that they put out before the scheduled album release date were mostly underwhelming.
While I grew to like "It's Different For Girls" and "My Fair Lady," there is no way to hide the fact that these two singles fall short of the standards of Montreal set for themselves in their previous works. In the same vain, while listening to "Let's Relate," the third single and track one off the album, it was so hard to maintain focus and I soon forgot that this was the album I had been anticipating for almost a year now. Fortunately, there were other moments on "Innocence Reaches" that served as redemption for the crimes of mediocrity that were carried out in the studio.
One of the reasons I have always cherished of Montreal's music is the fact that many of their songs are made up of smaller, and sometimes dazzlingly disparate, musical moments. This trait is especially evident in "Paralytic Stalks," which came out in 2012. "Trashed Exes'' hearkens back to that era, in which the risks of their elaborate experimentation still yielded enough success to sustain the attention of their devoted fan base. If I remember rightly, ''Paralytic Stalks'' was not able to attract a lot of new listeners, but perhaps this track will have more success due to their new and improved sound.
"Ambassador Bridge" starts out with a really nice groove, but like so many other songs on here, instead of elevating on the sound originally established, they just go into a minimalist version of what they were playing at the beginning. This practice is totally opposite to the of Montreal I know and love, and I hope I am not too optimistic in saying that, if ''Innocence Reaches'' was given a year or two to ripen, it could have achieved the same legendary status as its predecessors.
