Why does every great, long-lived rock band lose their greatness?

The phenomenon seems too widespread to deny: if you're a great band/artist who plays any kind of rock or pop music, and if you stay around for more than a few years, at some point you're going to lose your greatness. You might keep playing fantastic shows for decades, but only by heavily relying on your old material.

Just a few examples: the individual Beatles after the first couple solo albums from John, Paul, and George. Stevie Wonder after Songs in the Key of Life. Prince after Lovesexy. U2 after Achtung Baby. The Smashing Pumpkins after Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Nine Inch Nails after The Downward Spiral.

And there's an alarming number of great bands from the current decade whose most recent albums have exhibited a dramatic drop in standards: Death Cab for Cutie (Narrow Stairs), The Arcade Fire (Neon Bible), Rilo Kiley (Under the Blacklight), Dresden Dolls (Yes, Virginia), Spoon (Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga), and — I know some people strongly disagree with this — Radiohead (In Rainbows).

I would have added Of Montreal to that list when Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer? was their most recent album. But they have a new one out, Skeletal Lamping.

You can hear a full Of Montreal concert, with lots of songs from the new album, by going to this article and click the "hear the concert" link near the top of the page.

I love this band, so I was excited to see they had a new concert online. But looking over the set list (available at the same link), I was disappointed at how few songs they played from their 3rd and 4th most recent albums, The Sunlandic Twins and Satanic Panic in the Attic. You can hear the songs from those albums — which in my opinion are the highlights of the concert — by skipping ahead to these points:

• 4:40
• 32:30
  
• 43:50
  
• 1:02:00
  
• 1:41:30

As of this posting, you can hear Of Montreal's new album, more or less in its entirety, for free at their MySpace profile (tracks 1-15).

Their last two albums have a lot of the qualities that are all too common in past-their-prime rock bands: the music is, if anything, slightly more accomplished on a technical level, but it sounds like they ran out of ideas and tried to make up for it by doing a really good imitation of themselves.

As one example, "A Sentence of Sorts from Kongsvinger" (from Hissing Fauna...) sounds like they decided to scrounge through their previous album (The Sunlandic Twins) looking for hooks to piece together into a new song. (You can hear the song starting at 1:28:50 in the concert.) It's not bad, but it's sort of disillusioning, like watching a documentary on how they did the special effects in a movie.

So . . . what happens? Is it that the pressure of success makes them too self-conscious to come up with spontaneous ideas? Or is there just a certain age when rock musicians lose their magic, and one day, all they can come up with is well-intentioned fluff like . . .




(Photo of Kevin Barnes, the frontman and mastermind of Of Montreal, from the band's MySpace profile.)