Known for its outrageous and colorful
stage shows, indie pop band Of Montreal
has evolved over the course of nine albums
from fledgling indie rockers on seminal
Athens, Ga., Elephant 6 Record label into
gender-bending glam-rock experimentalists.
Led by multi-instrumentalist Kevin
Barnes, in recent years, the band’s sound
has shifted from quirky song-driven pop
albums towards intricate but scattered
dance-soundscapes on its newest release,
Skeletal Lamping.
The album boasts 15 named songs, but
that number is deceiving because almost
every song, despite their average lengths,
segments into new, often bizarre directions.
The album’s opener “Nonparallel of
Favor,” begins inauspiciously with a dancing
harpsichord, throbbing bass and Barnes’
voice only to add harmonies, followed by a
slower break which segways into three minutes
of cymbal and guitar white noise.
The band is no stranger to weird sounds
and nontraditional song writing, but with
Lamping, this is pushed to its extreme.
While listeners to the band’s previous
three albums, Satanic Panic in the Attic, The
Sunlandic Twins and Hissing Fauna, Are You
the Destroyer?, the band’s songs have each
time emerged increasingly intricate, layering
more and more elaborate harmonies,
distinct grooves and sound combinations.
On Lamping this has finally emerged, not
as one flowing avant-garde sound collage
or an epic flowing unit of song (a la the
second side of The Beatles’ Abbey Road),
but instead it carries the air of a mash up of
multiple album attempts fused to create an
album which is both intricate and flowing,
but also disconcerting. The prevalence of
morphing songs on the album does detract
from the beauty of some songs.
On the uncharacteristically calm and
melancholy “Touched Somethings Hollow,”
Barnes sadly sings, “I don’t know how long
I can hold on if it’s gonna be like this forever,”
only to cleanly shift into the album’s
rapturously happy “An Eluardian Instance.”
Filled with up-tempo guitar noodling and a
bright brass section, followed by an interlude
of keyboard hits and joyous lyrics, the
song embodies the band at its best: when it
is creating upbeat and densely layered and
harmonised pop songs.
Lamping features the band continuing to
move toward the dance-funk-glam it briefly
experimented with on its last album, most
notably on the song “Gronlandic Edit.”
Cuts like “Gallery Piece,” “St. Exquisites
Confessions” and “Beware our Nubile
Miscreants” follow this tendency as they
lyrically explore the bounds of sexuality and
humanity, embodied by Georgie Fruit, the
black transsexual alter ego of the married,
white Barnes.
Skeletal Lamping marks the next stage
in the group’s strange evolution. While a
continuously evolving album of ever-transitioning
songs marks an ambitious goal, the
album is at its best, not when continually
shifting, but when it remains in a groove
long enough to enjoy.