Album Reviews

Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes makes Freddie Mercury, Prince and David Bowie sound positively macho. His whiney vocalizing and gay shrieking makes glam-rock sound like Led Zeppelin. And while a Mercury song like “We Are the Champions” has become a ball game anthem, nothing in the Barnes oeuvre could possibly crossover—unless a day comes when what sound like gay diary entries become the favorite half-time sing alongs.

Yet, like Bowie (and unlike Mercury), the 35 year-old Barnes is married. He has a daughter. He wears dresses and fishnets and he’s pretty. He wants to make sex more dangerous. He wants to cut through the dreary conservatism and political correctness that afflicts most indie rock today. He wants fewer flannel shirts and an end to the cool post-ironic mindset. He wants less CBGBs and more Broadway.

Like Lou Reed, Barnes has taken a walk on the wild side and like Lou and Bowie, he’s done it, and is doing it “in character” (or at least that’s what they and he claims). We don’t know if he’s slept with boys but his imaginary character Georgie Fruit, a funk-rocking black dude in his late forties, surely has, along with having had multiple sex changes back and forth across the gender divide.

Barnes’s alter ego appeared in the middle of his last album, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, which might make a better intro to this man’s delightful musical mania than this outing, enjoyable though it may be. The busy guy has nine albums out at this point, one of the earlier ones of which was titled The Gay Parade, so it’s not as if he’s gotten into mining the sex thing late in the gayme, I mean game .

Barnes writes great pop tunes built upon electronic beats and filled with studio squiggles and samples. His arrangements are busy and preening. He’s got funk and disco in the arsenal as well, blended into chipper constructions backed by dark recollections and confessional yearnings. The juxtaposition of dark lyrics and bright melodies keeps all of it interesting, though this record involved more deep slogging than the previous one.

Despite the band’s name, Barnes is not “of Montreal. He’s “of Ohio” but currently lives in Athens, Georgia, perhaps living out in his music the flamboyant lifestyle a more closeted, more famous local resident hasn’t managed to express. But that’s none of my business.

There’s a charming, ‘70s vibe homemade quality to Barnes’s flitty confessional music, even if the confessions are those of a fictional character, so he says.

Barnes’s records have a generally dark and closed in sound, but they’re well-focused and backed by a great deal of clarity and solidity. This one was recorded in an Oslo, Norway studio called Apollinaire Rave and though Of Montreal is a band that plays live, this record sounds like a one man operation backed by the credits that read “Composed, performed, engineered and mixed by Kevin Barnes except for some help from….” drums, bass and guitars played by his bandmates.

Barnes is an ultra-talented producer who mixes matches, chops and pastes in shifting rhythmic and textural sonic vistas. Hearing a relatively young guy call and respond to the influences familiar to an older crowd adds interest to what is already interesting even if you have no backdrop on Barnes’s busyness.

Barnes’s theatrical sensibilities extend to the colorful packaging created by his brother that is alone worth the price of admission. The previous record was a triple-gatefolder. This one is a double, filled with fanciful, sexually discharged ambiguous images. The sleeves are filled with art, there’s a colorful insert. Even the insides of where you slide the thick vinyl is green, not cardboard and also includes is a large folded horse-shaped poster-thingie adorned with yet more sexually ambiguous youth in full bloom.

There’s a lot to look at and even more to hear. But if you’re not acquainted with Of Montreal, you might be better off starting with Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? or maybe Satanic Panic in the Attic (Polyvinyl PRC-069 LP).

If you’re too old or uptight for this man’s charming, dark whimsy (or his personal, terrorized confusion wrapped in charming, dark whimsy), you’re just too fucking old. Barnes’s vision is a welcome antidote to too much dreary, mannered, politically correct music.