Of Montreal has quite an uneven back catalog. Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? was one of last year’s best albums, but their debut, Cherry Peel, is the only one of their early cutesy twee pop records I can stand. Satanic Panic in the Attic was great; Sunlandic Twins just frustrating. So we must approach each new of Montreal record with a certain degree of trepidation—be optimistic for greatness, be primed for distress. What I wasn’t expecting from their ninth LP, Skeletal Lamping, was that both would be true. This is a maddening, schizophrenic, deranged, occasionally aurally repellent wreck. If you were to ever find someone who gleefully confessed to having listened to it a hundred times and loved every minute, turn around and walk away as quickly as you can. But in its bewildering verging-on-awfulness, it achieves something akin to frothing near-brilliance. Lamping should not be missed by anyone but the faint-hearted.
Kevin Barnes is quite the character, by which I mean that he may very well be clinically insane. We’ve all heard about his black, transsexual alter ego, Georgie Fruit, an escape apparently created out of the wreckage of Barnes’ broken marriage and resulting depression chronicled on Hissing Fauna. With Georgie, he forgoes commonplace post-divorce bile-spewing territory on Lamping by penning fifteen songs, which, stripped bare, are pretty much all essentially love songs. But before you fold your hands against your heart and sigh, “aww,” listen to the things he says. By shoving the listener straight up against psycho-sexual tension, come-ons, light torture and release (not to mention overstimulation), a first glance suggests that he’s promising to either repel us or turn us on in the kind of in-your-face fashion that is probably illegal in thirty-seven states. "We can do it softcore if you want/But you should know I go both ways." “I want to make you cum two hundred times a day.” “I want you to be my pleasure puss/I want to know what it’s like to be inside you.” “I took her standing in the kitchen, ass against the sink.” “I want to make you ejaculate 'til it's no longer fun.” He’s even raunchy with metaphors: “I’m so sick of sucking the dick of this cruel, cruel city.” Does Barnes/Georgie/whoever-else-lurks-within want to be Dirty Mind-era Prince? Several of these songs already have a Prince R&B/funk rock edge, after all. But not so—this isn’t blissfully lascivious stuff designed to make you sweaty, but depraved and regretful matter-of-fact narratives/fantasies.
The tunes are mostly constructed as a series of song snippets that crash against each other. Barnes starts off vamping like Prince and Jake Shears on “Nonpareil of Favor,” before he abruptly shifts over to a brief clip of Beatles-esque harmonizing, and then we’re struck by a slashing wall of guitar noise hammering down as hard and menacing as Goblin. Get used to the sudden rhythm interruptions. Each song ends not with a fade out and pause, nor do the tunes bleed into the next; they’re all disorienting splices that give the heart a skip. And within the songs—forget about it. No hook or melody can go uninterrupted on here. Even when shorter songs are more seamless in their transitions, they usually include bowties of funk, disco flourishes and blazes of clashing electro-pop. A rare exception is the under-a-minute-and-a-half “Touched Something’s Hollow,” which is a beautiful but bleak Lennon-esque ballad. Elsewhere, we are jarred again and again by the lyrics, musical “indecisiveness,” and the ways in which every thorny pop nugget asks us to dance, die and do it in each degenerate breath.
Consider the seven-minute-plus “Plastis Wafers,” which has one of the album’s most irresistible pop hooks, but races through dramatic synth sweeps and David Byrne/Andy Partridge paranoid rock stuttering. It’s an entire album condensed into one song, fractured as it may be. There’s little doubt that Barnes could have turned his surfeit of ideas into a half-dozen full-lengths if he’d liked. And Lamping finds time for its share of self-indulgence, but the moments are generally brief. “An Eluardian Instance” is one the best songs on the album, but the last forty seconds feel tacked on gratuitously; as if Barnes needed to be consistently, well, inconsistent. “Beware Our Nubile Miscreants” is about eight or nine song fragments in all, and some are doubtlessly better than others, with Barnes plugging away at each step like they’ll die in his arms should he hold on too long. For all of the album’s questionable left turns, we can be assured that each misstep will be righted again after thirty to sixty seconds.
At just under an hour in whole, Lamping is no doubt expansive and exhausting. It’s not easy to go end to end in one sitting, particularly since Barnes/Georgie refuses to let us ever feel safe within its boundaries. And positioning the madcap dance single, “Id Engager,” at the end of the album denies us the catharsis we desperately crave. But maybe there is no happy resolution here. Barnes doesn’t seek to kill Georgie; he just wants to give him/her/him a venue and voice for the sake of whatever shreds of sanity he has left.
But this is no mere Bowie-being-Ziggy performance piece, mind you. Skeletal Lamping is I-gotta-exorcise-some-demons stuff. It’s ragged and brutal no matter how much Barnes planned ahead of time to get things just right. He’s challenging himself; the audience matters for nothing. It’s a tough album to repeat, but one listen certainly isn’t enough to catch all the melodies, uncover all the secrets and forgive all the flaws. Because make no mistake about it—Lamping is a freakish mess. But anyone able and willing to make it all the way through will be rewarded by getting to peer into the abyss without plunging in like Barnes probably already has.
