If you have seen the commercial for Outback with the lilting refrain “Let’s go Outback tonight/life will still be here tomorrow” then you have heard Of Montreal — unless you’re hearing impaired or watch television with the sound muted.

The Outback jingle is a chintzy version of one of the Athens, Ga., pop band’s best singles, “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games),” with the words “Let’s go Outback tonight” replacing the more dour, less steak-a-rific “Let’s pretend we don’t exist.” Kevin Barnes, the lead singer and songwriter for Of Montreal, said he allowed Outback to use the song because he thought it would be “amusing” to hear how the steakhouse chain’s ad wizards transformed it into a jingle. Maybe so, but I suspect when Barnes gave permission for “Everyday Feels like Sunday” to score a NASDAQ commercial or for “Requiem for O.M.M.2” to be used on “The O.C.,” his decision was all about the coin.

As Barnes knows all too well, making psychedelic-pop music is a relatively unlucrative career. When he moved to Athens in the mid-’90s, Barnes was the sole member of Of Montreal. Once there, however, he became affiliated with the incestuous group of retro-pop bands known as The Elephant Six Collective. The collective began when four childhood friends — Robert Schneider, Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart and Jeff Mangum — formed the bands that would largely define the Elephant Six sound: Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel. The ranks of the collective soon swelled as Magnum, Hart, Schneider and Doss started The Elephant Six Recording Company and began playing in other bands in addition to their own and collaborating on each others’ projects.

The music of The Elephant Six Collective is firmly rooted in strong melodies and experimentation representative of the collective’s communal love of The Beatles, The Velvet Underground and the psychedelic pop music of the ’60s. Even though much of the output of The Elephant Six is critically revered and remains a treasured staple at college radio stations, the bands made little commercial impact. And while nearly every band affiliated with Elephant Six has contributed to an Of Montreal album, Of Montreal (with Barnes remaining the only consistent member) is one of the few Elephant Six bands that has continually toured and released new albums after the mid-’90s heyday of the collective. Consequently, Of Montreal is the only band to have pushed the Elephant Six sound the furthest.

In 2004, Barnes had to move with his pregnant wife to her hometown of Oslo, Norway, to take advantage of the country’s inclusive healthcare system because neither of them had health insurance in the United States. The culture shock and isolation of Norway spiraled Barnes into a devastating depression that he describes in the songs that comprise the first half of Of Montreal’s new and best album (out Tuesday), “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?”

Instead of ensnaring his depression with moody acoustic songs, Barnes instead pairs deeply personal lyrics with wildly flamboyant pop music. For instance, the first single, “Heimdalsgate like a Promethean Curse,” begins with a stabbing, ominous organ as if it were announcing an approaching villain in a silent movie, but within seconds the song sweeps into a cheerful synthesizer bop over a drum-machine break beat while Barnes pleads, “I’m in a crisis/ I need help/ Come on mood-shift, shift back to good again.” Xanax’s next commercial has practically written itself.

Just a few months ago I saw Of Montreal in concert, and for much of the show Barnes vamped and slinked his way around the stage in a red mini-dress. Almost the entire crowd was dancing. Now Of Montreal’s hyper-pop sound, which really began to take shape with 2005’s “Sunlandic Twins,” is as indebted to Bowie, Sly Stone and Prince as it is ‘60s pop. If Olivia Tremor Control’s 1996 album “Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk at Cubist Castle” sounds like a great lost, late-1960s album from The Beatles, then Of Montreal provides a template for what The Beatles may have sounded like if they had stayed together and continued to evolve their sound into the ‘70s, absorbing elements of disco, glam rock and funk along the way.

The first six songs of “Hissing Fauna” is the strongest sequence of pop that I’ve heard in a long time -- “Gronlandic Edit” and “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” are back-to-back magic. The second half of the album is nearly as strong and lyrically more upbeat. Barnes goes genre hopping through cut-and-paste songs relying heavily on shuttling bass, drum machining and falsettos, but his gift for inventive vocal melodies and strong choruses keep the songs from unraveling.

Hopefully, with the release of “Hissing Fauna” Barnes can finally earn the kind of paycheck that results from an album connecting with a larger audience and not just advertising executives with keen ears for a great pop song.



Address correspondence to Jeremiah Tucker, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, MO 64802.