Of Montreal’s Pop Odyssey

Midway through Of Montreal’s show last Friday night
at New York
City’s Roseland Ballroom, bandleader Kevin Barnes—wearing
gold-lamé hot pants, makeup, and (naturally) nothing
else—rode out onstage atop a live horse, singing into a
microphone in one hand and gently stroking the animal’s white mane with
the other. It wasn’t the weirdest sight of the night—the whole
show played out like one unbelievably surreal dream—but it was
the most quietly stunning.

Elsewhere in the performance, Barnes appeared as an electric-blue
mariachi with a pink sombrero strapped to his back; as a red-robed pope
enthroned with a sexy nun lying at his feet; as a Voltron-like being
with a giant head and limbs operated by invisible black-clad figures,
in a pair of roller skates the size of bumper cars with an oversized
blue-sequin fanny pack to match; as a centaur with working hind legs
provided by someone in the modified ass section of a two-man horse
costume; and as a ghost or mummy covered in white shaving cream. He
emerged from a curtained box carried by four lumpy, golden, doughboyish
bearers. He was entertained by a sword dancer in an inflated
polka-dotted garbage bag wielding what looked like giant crab legs. He
was begged for (but decided to deny) clemency by a prisoner in an
animal mask. He was hung and sang while dangling from his noose. He
rose again from a white coffin. He shot glitter out of a
spotlight-shining cannon.

Throughout, Barnes’s bandmates—dressed in a tutu, a tuxedo,
cowboy attire, an Afro, and a vaguely shamanic cloak,
respectively—played on risers of various dizzying heights
flanking the center stage, frequently switching instruments and
positions, darting up and down the cliffs like nattily dressed mountain
goats. In the canyon formed between the risers, there was a white
screen that occasionally drifted upstage and swung around to reveal a
series of set pieces. There was an old-West saloon scene that broke
inevitably into a brawl, cowboys flipping the card table and drawing
pistols, a piano man breaking a bottle over someone’s head, one downed
gunman falling backward through the saloon doors and accidentally
pulling the scenery down with him. There was a tableau of domestic
abuse frozen midstrangulation.

Downstage, a bunch of other shit happened: The lumpy gold figures
did a synchronized dance led by Barnes; a tiger-headed man in a white
suit was beaten to the ground by a mob of black-bodysuited figures
while a video of tiger heads flashed above the stage; a pipe-playing
satyr cavorted with masquerading revelers; a beach scene unfolded with
a simulated nudist couple caressing each other while a muscle man in a
naval cap and his trophy blonde, both clothed, looked on, annoyed.

Some moments were more lyrically literal: A crew of paramilitaries
in camouflage and black ski masks stormed the stage as Barnes sang
about “midnight raids” on “An Eluardian Instance,” breaking formation
as all but one of their number was overcome by ecstatic dancing until
the remaining soldier sprinkled glitter over each of them, transforming
them, one by one, back into goose-stepping zombies. “Gallery Piece” was
accompanied by a corresponding video (e.g., for the line “I wanna be
your what’s happening,” the screen flashed a shot of the cast of the TV
show What’s Happening). Barnes emerged with his whole body
painted crimson for the song “Plastis Wafers,” with its lines “You give
me such a rush/Make my whole body blush.”

Of Montreal played mostly songs from the new album, Skeletal
Lamping, their ninth, out October 21 on Polyvinyl, along with a few
select older numbers. Skeletal Lamping largely eschews
traditional song structures, opting instead for songs that segue
directly into each other, forming multiple-track suites, or else seem
to turn into new songs midway through, unfolding in multiple discrete
passages rather than repeating parts. Listening to the album without
looking at your playback device, you’d be hard-pressed to tell where
one song ends and another begins. To re-create these blurring and
jarring effects, the band played several sets of songs back to back, as
they are on the album.

The album is every bit as ambitious and absurd as the stage show.
For one thing, it’s being released in a variety of unusual physical
mediums, including traditional CDs and vinyl as well as T-shirts,
button sets, wall decals, paper lanterns, and tote bags, all packaged
with codes for MP3 downloads of the album.

Musically, the album is the fruitful culmination of a years-long
metamorphosis for Of Montreal, begun midway through their career with
Satanic Panic in the Attic, from lo-fi cartoon psych-pop to
their current idiosyncratic mix of imaginative glam, dark disco, fey
pop, and freaky funk. Skeletal Lamping shifts easily from pomp
and fanfare (the platform-boot-stomping piano chorus and swooning
synths of “Triphallus, to Punctuate!” and the gaudy horns of “An
Eluardian Instance”) to gentle acoustic ballads (“Touched Something’s
Hollow,” the second passage of “Death Is Not a Parallel Move”), with
plenty of unexpected hairpin musical turns in between. As with his
recent albums, Skeletal Lamping was written, played, and
recorded almost entirely by Barnes, with his band joining him only to
realize the material live, but its densely layered multitracked vocal
harmonies, guitars, synths, drum machines, and effects hardly sound
like a solo effort.

Or maybe it just sounds like a schizophrenic solo effort, as
Skeletal Lamping famously stars Georgie Fruit, Barnes’s
glammed-up stage alter ego, an imaginary fortysomething, black,
transsexual ’70s funk singer who first appeared in the lyrics of
Hissing Fauna. But Skeletal Lamping is no simple rock
opera or concept album. It doesn’t so much have a narrative arc as it
does a series of strange scenes, folding in on and out of itself like a
dream, with Barnes playing a cast of characters, fluidly shifting
identities (and gender roles, races, and sexual
orientations)—it’s rather like the stage show. Lyrically,
Skeletal Lamping marks a new, weird high for Barnes,
successfully combining the two polar ends of his songwriting spectrum:
the revealingly personal psychological dramas of Hissing Fauna with the fanciful storytelling of earlier albums.

The album begins, on “Nonpareil of Favor,” with Barnes singing over
some traipsing harpsichord, “My lover, I’ve been donating time to
review/All the misinterpretations that define me and you.” It reads
like a dedication or an apology for how Hissing Fauna‘s
uncommonly direct autobiographical songs (such as “The Past Is a
Grotesque Animal,” which detailed the breakup of Barnes and his now
reconciled wife, Nina) led to his family’s personal life being
dissected in the press. The song’s next line, “I’m thinking about you
in my secret language,” sets the agenda for the rest of the
album—there is real substance here, but it’s disguised and mixed
with enough fantasy so as to be more safely indecipherable.

By the beginning of Lamping‘s next song, “Wicked Wisdom,”
Barnes is fully draped in Georgie Fruit’s colorful drag, boasting, “I’m
a motherfucking headline/But, bitch, you don’t even know it” (one can’t
help but think of the tabloid headlines of Prince’s Controversy here). But Barnes is continually peeking out from behind the masks and
curtains. Sometimes, Barnes is singing as Fruit, sometimes he’s singing
about him, other times he seems to be addressing one or the other of
them as someone else entirely.

Fruit (Barnes?) is omnivorously hypersexual—he “take[s] it
both ways,” takes women “standing in the kitchen, ass against the
sink,” “turn[s] tricks on the hood of [a] car,” wants to make you
“ejaculate till it’s no longer fun,” doesn’t “wanna be your man/just
wanna play with you.” (Fruit’s gender-bending, “queered out”
personality could seem like crass tourism or sexual minstrelsy, if it
weren’t for the fact that Barnes ultimately seems so genuinely
sympathetic.)

Barnes (Fruit?) is prone to self-analytic
psychobabble—”screaming out to [the ladies] from the depths of
this phallocentric tyranny,” “roleplay[ing] Oedipus Rex,” wondering
“why [he’s] so damaged, girl,” or emerging from a cloud of voices, from
“bad weather in [his] temporary head,” to sing, “I’m just trying to get
healthy.”

Both indulge in sometimes sinister, sometimes sublime psychedelic
fantasy. At other times, Barnes’s inventive, hyperspecific lyrics are
grounded in the mundane (“He’s the kind of guy who would leave you in a
K-hole/To go play Halo in the other room.”) This ultimately is
what makes all of the above work: Barnes is a ridiculously gifted
songwriter; he makes what looks conceptually bloated on paper sound
like the most natural thing in the world.

The New York show ended with the cast (which includes Barnes’s wife,
brother David, and various other lovers, friends, and exes of the band)
coming out for a bow and the new drummer leading the crowd in a chant
of “What do we want? PIZZA! When do we want it? PIZZA!” For the encore,
the band, cast, and opening act all returned to the stage for a version
of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that lit up the capacity crowd
like a sea of Black-Cat firecrackers.

Last time Of Montreal played Seattle, there were rumors that Barnes
would be singing from atop a 15-foot-tall dress, like some kind of glam
Mother Ginger. No such fantastic props materialized at the show,
however, and instead Of Montreal played with merely the usual makeup,
spandex, and sequins. Even a fraction of this show’s spectacle would
make for an awesome concert. Everything but the horse is supposed to
make it out on this tour.

Of Montreal play Nov 19 at Showbox Sodo,
8 pm, $20,
all ages.