Typically, a lot of hype makes me put an album off for ages, but when this one friend tells me something is great, I jump on it, because his recommendations are always quality.

Sometimes I can see myself growing older in the music I listen to. The turning points of my adulthood can be mapped; albums in place of cities as I move from one location to the next. I find myself returning to artists who were incomprehensible to me at sixteen. It's much the same as realizing you've grown up when you prefer the cookie to the icing, or would rather fight over the bottom bunk.

Of Montreal is one such artist I had wrinkled my nose at in the past, as a child would snub leafy greens at dinner. I found Kevin Barnes obnoxious and yelpy, and granted, these qualities remain in his music, but I myself have developed an appreciation for context, and humour in music.

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer(?) is an album of frenetic pop, chronicling Kevin Barnes' descent into depression following a separation from his wife and a sabbatical to Sweden. The album juxtaposes feel-good psychedelic pop with dark, often dryly funny lyrics about depression and medication.

Musically, Hissing Fauna is a pop triumph, with heavy emphasis on melody, memorable funky basslines, and thickly layered Berlin-era-Bowie harmonies. The album peaks with The Past is a Grotesque Animal, detailing with spastic intensity Barnes' separation madness and subsequent transformation into transgendered alter-ego Georgie Fruit, a character so comical and perturbed it presumably served as a great emotional outlet for Barnes. If only we could all channel our negativity into such deeply troubled characters; the world would be a much more creative and disturbing place.

Hissing Fauna parallels in many ways the last year of my life, and my own (less flamboyant) transformation, which is perhaps why I feel so much respect for it. I too spent the better part of a year plagued by chemical imbalances, proceeded by an unpleasant separation, after which I fled to England to find refuge and recovery, wherein I have discovered my own, less outlandish alter-ego. Hissing Fauna has been a large and relevant part of this process in self-rediscovery.

It would be easy to examine Barnes' synth-riddled songs and goofy observations and chalk Hissing Fauna up to garish drivel as I once did, but I feel it takes a great deal more maturity to laugh and make light of one's own severe depression than it does to simply bury it. Kevin Barnes' display of ironic poise is something we could all learn from.