Thinking as an outside party, it must be quite odd to be a musician and enter an era where you’re not only thinking about creating new music, but also being constantly aware of the knowledge that key works of yours are now hitting their tenth, fifteenth, or twentieth anniversaries. Such is the scenario in which Kevin Barnes of Atlanta’s of Montreal finds themself.
Barnes and the project have been an unceasing creative force throughout the years: their most recent original release was 2024’s Lady on the Cusp, though the title alone doesn’t quite sell the continued evolution of of Montreal quite so well as 2022’s Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck or the earlier I Feel Safe with You, Trash. But as time has wont to do, significant anniversaries do in fact arrive for albums like 2005’s The Sunlandic Twins. It was a notable marker of the band attaining new levels of creativity, songwriting, and popularity alike – and now becomes an opportunity to display an older record in its entirety to collections of people who literally may not have been born when it was released into the world.
Looking back at music recent enough to be obviously-formative in the modern era but also old enough to be observed with a not-insignificant degree of hindsight is always a strange task, in the realm of “criticism”/analysis that I allegedly occupy. Opener ‘Requiem for O.M.M.2’ would likely have jostled my brain had I actually listened to it around release when I was approximately twelve years of age; but having come to it many years later and relistening to it now, I can see how it follows a somewhat “normal” pop-song structure. It’s no less entertaining, but one recursively wonders how much each song like this shaped what “normal” even means for weird-pop, psychedelia, and guitar music in general. There’s truly no substitute for having been there, but we can play at reconstructing how this all went in the incomprehensibly-fertile musical era of the 2000s. (And we’re not even going to talk about how unfortunately-prescient ‘Forecast Fascist Future’ has turned out to be in its title alone.)
The set is also an opportunity to see setlist staples like ‘Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games’ and encore-defining ‘The Party’s Crashing Us’ in their original contexts, maybe for the first and only time. And naturally everything is augmented by the band’s ever-faithful complement of live visuals and choreography components – figures changing form from skintight, faceless bodysuits to avian creatures and more from song to song – nothing new to longtime fans, but ever a reason to seek out a live of Montreal show. As we covered in our preview, the band have issued a comprehensive twentieth-anniversary edition of The Sunlandic Twins, which among other things serves to collect era B-sides and scattered tracks. In keeping with that theme, the encore set for the show is comprised of a selection of tracks from that cohort. A highlight is ‘Everyday Feels Like Sunday’, which very overtly riffs on the title of a Morrissey track but trades his typical moroseness for a winkingly-positive chorus backed by a joyous wall of sound.
of Montreal’s Sunlandic Twins anniversary tour continues through August of 2025 – though the prolific band, under any circumstances, remains something one must see in one’s lifetime; though once you’ve been anointed, it likely won’t stop as a one-off experience. Barnes and company are as compelling now as they were in 2005, and should the world not dissolve itself in some sort of firestorm before then, it is entirely possible the 2040s will consist of a nonzero number of of Montreal anniversary tours.
Photos and words by Collin Heroux
