Coincidentally the record's shortest and consequently sharpest (or at least starkest) track Malefic Dowery – on which Barnes appositely warbles of living "in fear of your schizophrenic genius", thus more or less as we do his – is fuelled by a lightly camp kitschness evocative of that which wafts up from the orchestra pit beneath any which Wainwright. However on a record that documents Barnes in as fine, if "schizophrenic" fettle as ever no genre-labelled pigeonhole goes unstuffed, whether it be the sexed-up Prince-via-power pop-via-martial snare stomp of Ye, Renew the Plaintiff or the oh-Weezer-do-like-to-be-beside-the-seaside wonky R'n'B of Spiteful Intervention. It's a record that's berserk to the point of pure bafflement and slight disconcertion (for unadulterated sonic terror try We Will Commit Wolf Murder) as you're left wildly swinging legs and vehemently kicking feet in frantic search of discernible foothold.
Musically however, conversely, Paralytic Stalks is questionably the indeterminably infinite troupe's most intricate and in many ways engaging effort thus far and this may be indebted to the increased presence of Barnes' sensei of sorts Kishi Bashi, whose fluttering strings on the aforesaid Spiteful Intervention frolic gleefully beneath Barnes' pseudo-confessional gibberish. The strings then swim away to allow an array of brass and woodwind to embellish the falsetto funk of the segueing Dour Percentage with fringes of Isley Brothers-ish Motown, the track rendered an inevitable single in both length and languid chorus freakily redolent of Bill Withers' Lovely Day. In its closing moments Paralytic Stalks becomes rather convoluted and periodically confused as on the slide guitar-centric Wintered Debts that stops and starts to two discordant rhythms and ends up sounding like Hunter S. Thompson spewing quips of "sipping on my own vomit" over trudged drudgery dredged up from The Thrills' well-dusted back catalogue. Exorcismic Breeding Knife is aqueous and ominous in the extreme as Barnes et al. pillage the depths of the outrightly avant-garde to summon the impression of jittery horror set at 20,000 leagues under the sea prior to disintegrating into deranged cacophony while Authentic Pyrrhic Remission, the The Past is a Grotesque Animal of Paralytic Stalks if you will, elicits corrupted imagery of a scantily clad Yeasayer reinterpreting early Spice Girls numbers before blooming in quite poignant piano-based balladry. Hardly one for the faint-hearted nor for fans of a resolutely steadfast style to course through the tracklisting is Paralytic Stalks but then again, to paraphrase the equally capricious avant-garde adherent David Byrne, that's merely the same as it ever was.
