Reprinted from San Francisco Weekly
October 28, 1998
by Chris Baty

There are three stages that cart be used to track all romantic relationships. In Stage 1, the "we were made for each other" stage, lust and possibility cause a run on rose tinted glasses. In Stage 2, couples see only differences. Only successful pairings move on to Stage 3: compromise.

The pop music canon can be divided by the same arc. Almost every pop song's core message is either "You're the greatest thing ever (Stage 1) or "You're no longer my baby" (Stage 2). The statistically insignificant segment of songs unaccounted for by the first or second stages falls into Stage 3. The entire stages theory made perfect sense until Athens, Ga.'s Of Montreal loused everything up. The boys went and put out an album of love songs, the bulk of which reside on an invisible edge between Stages 1 and 2.

Their record, The Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy, is a concept album, following one couple as they meet, fall in love, and slowly grow apart. The story unfolds in two acts, each eight- songs long. Imagine the Beach Boys writing a psychedelic musical, and you'll have a good idea of the record's sound: lushly recorded garage pop - heavy on the vocal harmonies, guitar, piano, bells, and whistles - equally nimble in its evocation of love and sadness.

The curtain opens on Track 1, "One of a Very Few of a Kind," where the protagonist offers his admiring but realistic assessment of a new friend. Cautious optimism, though, soon falls into Stage 1 idolatry. By Track 4 the beloved has become "a little viola hidden in the orchestra," and the protagonist, accompanied by a chorus of singing seashells, decides that to win her heart he must hide his fears and reservations.

His plan succeeds, and one song later it's "The Couple's First Kiss," an instrumental reverie of distant bells and calliope. The dreaminess of it all, however, is undercut by the tiny occasional pulse of an alarm clock buried deep within the mix. It's a subtle sign of things to come; over the next 10 songs a growing ambivalence eventually sends the new love into Stage 2. By Track 16 ("It's easy to sleep when you're dead"), their love has petered out entirely.

The tale may not be an original one, but Of Montreal's telling is transcendent. Simultaneously playful and penetrating, the band uses a host of intrasong devices like a 15-second drama within "Little Viola" - to bring listeners more fully into the story. That a pop band could so creatively and accurately convey the tiny changes in perception that either doom or strengthen a relationship is remarkable. The most amazing thing about the album, though, is the way it so presciently nails a stage of relationships usually too intricate to be touched by pop songs: The space where bhss begins its imperceptible journey toward dissolution.