Unless those £3 cocktails you chug have Elixir of Life mixed into its swampwater, everybody croaks sometime. Death is universal, but people’s reaction to the reaper is not. Some tear out their hair; others throw a party. An anthropologist’s paradise, a wake is a brew of cigarette exhale, swirling whiskey and fulminating fiddles consumed by the mourning kin staying awake until dawn, while the departed drifts to sleep. It is both a celebration and a lament- an acknowledgment that life and death, light and dark are two sides of the same coin.

Paralytic Stalks is the 10th studio album by the prolific Kevin Barnes and his band, of Montreal. His latest effort is a step away from 2010’s relatively streamlined indie-R&B effort False Priest. Paralytic Stalks, a proudly confused and convoluted record and probably their least commercial to date, has a much darker and more sinister subject matter than its predecessor. If False Priest was obsessed with the joy of sex, Paralytic Stalks is concerned with the consequential ‘la petite mort.’ What makes this record remarkable is how colourful and polychromatic its approach to such bleak subject matter can be.

It’s quite a claim, but this might be the band’s most experimental record yet. ‘Wintered Debts,’ the album’s absolute peak could be of Montreal’s ‘Paranoid Android.’ It begins as an Elliot Smith style ballad but over the course of seven schizophrenic minutes in heaven, mutates into a honky-tonk country stomper, stumbles into baroque pop and crash lands into clattering piano chords and strings.

‘Exorcismic Breeding Knife’ pushes this experimentalism further than anything else here; it doesn’t just lack melody, it bludgeons it around the head with an entire woodwind section. This stupefying spoken-word track feels like the soundtrack to a Hammer horror film too eerie to be allowed exist.

This made-up word “exorcismic,” presumably a combination of exorcism and orgasmic, is undoubtedly the best way to describe Paralytic Stalks: achieving ecstasy and delirium from purging and purifying. ‘Spiteful Intervention,’ a Perspex confession box filled with shame, regret and self-loathing could be the catchiest song in this largely hookless collection. Elsewhere, on ‘Malefic Dowery’ he admits to his valentine that he is “in fear of your schizophrenic genius” – something the listener could say to Barnes himself about this delightfully dissonant LP.

Paralytic Stalks is both completely chaotic and incredibly intricate. Fragile but ferocious, there is no white light at the end of this tunnel, just white noise - but it couldn’t be brighter. This record, one of their finest, is no casual listen; it demands one’s attention as it collapses around the listener in a wave of entropy. This album surely marks the beginning of a new phase in of Montreal’s career. A rebirth.