Music
Sexual feeling
by Nick Bollinger
Of Montreal are no longer the indie shoe-gazers.
With Prince busy door-knocking for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, there is surely a market gap, perhaps even a spiritual need, for the latest album by Of Montreal.
Not since Prince was at his purple peak with albums such as Dirty Mind has a pop act made sex so singularly the subject of a record, or at least done it in a way that is so startlingly original, musical and funny.
“We can do it soft-core if you want,” croons Kevin Barnes, Of Montreal’s frontman and mastermind, “but you should know that I go both ways.”
His voice is deceptively sweet and more than a little Prince-like, especially when he concludes the line with a falsetto trill, while the programmed drums and disco bass line pump athletically.
Moments later, the groove is interrupted by one of Barnes’ frequent smash cuts, and we are thrown abruptly to a piano ballad, followed by soaring psychedelic pop.
Of Montreal didn’t start out this good. When Barnes formed the group a decade ago in the southern US university town of Athens, Georgia (the birthplace of R.E.M.), they were broadly typical of indie bands of the period – guitar-based, rough-edged and self-consciously oblique. The name, which has long caused confusion, referred to a Canadian girlfriend Barnes had at the time.
Over nine albums, of which the first half-dozen or so reached only a narrow indie -audience, Barnes has worked his way towards the accomplished and individualised breakthrough of Skeletal Lamping.
The title implies shining a light on whatever might be hidden in the closet, which is more or less what Barnes does in these songs. Inhabiting a range of personas – from shy and repressed to aggressive and obnoxious – he reports on a variety of intimate encounters.
Barnes can be a hilarious tease: “Baby I’ll blow you … whatever kind of kisses you want.” He can also be edgy and provocative. Just titling a song Women’s Studies Victims seems designed to raise hackles.
Earlier albums showed a darker side of Barnes’ psyche. 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? reflected on a period of trauma and depression. But the feeling of -Skeletal Lamping is, for the most part, celebratory; a shedding of neuroses and hang-ups rather than a study of them.
And crucially, there has been a shift in the music. Barnes has clearly been soaking up some funk, and along with the Prince parallels you can hear traces of 80s dance sounds mixed with the remnants of the indie past.
Yet any suggestion of retro is swept away by Barnes’ linear approach to song structure. Although his tunes are full of hooks, you will rarely find anything as prosaic as a chorus -following a verse. The effect is more that of a song cycle, such as Brian Wilson’s Smile.
And by all accounts, Of Montreal have developed an onstage act as eye-popping as their material. One only has to see a picture of them looking like the Village People at an Acid Test to know they have come a long way from the indie shoe-gazers of a decade ago. At a show last year in Vegas, Barnes dispensed with his clothes altogether. It will be fascinating to see the effect Of Montreal’s highly charged music has on local audiences when they play in New Zealand this month.
SKELETAL LAMPING, Of Montreal (Popfrenzy);
OF MONTREAL: February 25, Kings Arms, Auckland; February 26, San Francisco Bath House, Wellington.
