Of Montreal
makes most of its quirkiness
Of Montreal/The M’s
March 5, 2006
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in
The Boston Globe, March 7, 2006
It’s tricky enough when any one-man band takes to
the road
with an expanded lineup, but Of Montreal has it tougher than most. Not
only was
core member Kevin Barnes responsible for almost all the sounds on its
last two
albums, Satanic Panic In The Attic and
the current The Sunlandic Twins, the
project is idiosyncratic even by the standards of the Elephant 6
collective to
which it used to belong alongside the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel and
Olivia
Tremor Control. But even as a five-piece, the band’s eccentricity
remained
intact Sunday at the
That was clear enough as a glitter-bedecked Barnes took the stage in a wedding dress and a veil declaring, “We want to make love to you all night long!” In a way, it was as though a gauntlet had been thrown: at that point, you were either with him or in for a long night. The singer wasn’t entirely kidding around, though. Once he stripped down on stage to jeans and an open shirt (itself later jettisoned for flowing lamé), he had the casual swagger and joyful demeanor of an unselfconscious love god.
Barnes’s tremulous tenor shout and pseudo-Brit singing accent bore strong similarities to Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and London Suede’s Brett Anderson, while the music most often resembled a supercharged version of the early Magnetic Fields. The resulting noise made New Wave club anthems out of “Rapture Rapes The Muses,” “The Party’s Crashing Us” and the “Funkytown”-like disco of “Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games,” while “Oslo In The Summertime” was driven by a drum machine and deep bass, with the other instruments simply adding filigree.
Songs like those had no problem accomplishing the
task, notoriously
difficult in
Openers the M’s played a generous if repetitive 45-minute set of Sloan-style power rock.