Of Montreal: Skeletal Lamping

"It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

That's H.L. Mencken elucidating with precision my attitude towards music criticism. Actually, that's my attitude towards GOOD music criticism -- flap and doodle, marked by a grandeur of badness, is the state towards which music criticism aspires. "But," you, gentle imaginary reader, say, "aren't you Dr. Teeth, that guy who writes all the lame music reviews on this site?" Yes, but I m also that guy who smokes cigarettes and masturbates regularly; a compulsion is a compulsion, and like a good nicotine rush or lesbian porn-induced orgasm, a rumbling, bumbling crawl through an abysm of pish can be a very nice, if hollow, pleasure. I'm old enough now that I no longer expect rock albums to save my life -- I'm perfectly comfortable, most of the time, with using them as nothing more than sensual treats, intellectual curiosities, and occasions for extended bloviation.

But sometimes an album refuses to be reviewed. A record feels too big and artful and strange to be crammed into a four hundred word essay. You find yourself unable to assume that unearned voice of authority that makes criticism comfortable. So you write a largely incoherent, rambling introduction riffing on H.L. Mencken in order to delay the inevitable. Then you write a bizarrely self-aware second paragraph discussing your first paragraph to delay it further. All because you don't want to write a review that's less criticism than shrill, hyperbolic hucksterism.

I should really stop here. One shouldn't review an album while still in the puppy days of salad love. It's the music critic's equivalent of going to the supermarket hungry: you come home and realize that your shopping bags are filled with nothing but Oreos and adjectives. (Third paragraph now, and still no mention of the album. I'm starting to think I can make it all the way through this thing without talking about anything but myself.) So, please, don't think of the following as a music review. Think of it as an exhortation, a shill, a terrorist demand.

----

The odd, pop-minded non-Canadian band Of Montreal tread into odder, funkier territory on their wondrous new record Skeletal Lamping, released today on Polyvinyl. Structured less as a traditional album than a series of mash-ups, frontman and general mastermind Kevin Barnes spits hooks at a breakneck pace, rarely slowing long enough for his jagged little shards of song to sink in or even fully register. The fifteen tracks on the disc seem to be divided somewhat randomly, and perhaps a more accurate track listing would reveal the album as hundreds of tiny songs, united by their thematic elements: sex, psychosis, paranoia, sex, the multiplicity of perception, and sex. Gleefully blowing the doors off of the polite mausoleum that much of indie rock has become, Barnes crafts a vision of human sexuality that's both titillating and frightening in its candor and danger. Prince-like in both his obsessive, live-wire sexuality and his ability to craft impossibly itchy, spine-tingling hooks, he's pulling a Justin Timberlake for the hipster set: he's bringing sexy back.

As with all Of Montreal albums, there's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance between the delectably catchy sound of the music and the tortured, schizoid nature of the lyrics. Unlike their previous records, though, here this stylistic tic works in sync with their conceptual vision. Like sex itself, the album is overwhelmingly pleasurable, but anyone who looks a little deeper can see what's underpinning the ecstasy: a complex cocktail of fear, guilt and desperation, so ugly that it attains a weirdly transcendent beauty. A lyric like "I confess to being quite charmed by your feminine effects; you're the only one with whom I would role-play Oedipus Rex," reads as funny and gross on the page, but coming in the middle of the garden of sensual delights that is "Plastis Wafers," it sounds complex, disturbing and admirable in its honesty. There's an intense sexual narcissism about the album -- rather than navel gazing perhaps we should call it penis gazing -- but it's a necessary narcissism, a narcissism without which this level of dizzying self-examination and -awareness would not be possible.

In my usual reviews, this would be the moment when I attempted to describe the sound of the music, perhaps using phrases like "glissando bass lines" or "cascading piano arpeggios" to create the illusion that I know what the fuck I'm talking about. But on an album as instrumentally rich, multifarious and fractured as Skeletal Lamping, it's almost impossible to do (at least in a few paragraphs). Shifting styles as quickly and easily as he does sexual identities, Barnes will ram a disco earworm head on into an Abbey Road piano singalong, then suddenly deke into a nasty, bass-driven, white-boy funk jam, all in the space of two minutes. There’s no way this should work, and at best I should be describing it as some sort of glorious mess, but somehow there’s nothing remotely messy about this record. There’s a unity and coherence to Skeletal Lamping that belies the modular, restlessly ADD construction. It’s a rich treasure trove of wildly different sounds and moods and melodies, yet somehow it feels all of a piece, a Major Work in the sense that people used to use to discuss new albums by the Beach Boys or Beatles, back when widely accessible pop was taken seriously as art. Lately the bands that are taken seriously have become the ivory tower bands, locked far away from the mindless masses, performing impressive feats of musical esotericism for their enlightened listeners. Bands like Deerhoof and No Age and Grizzly Bear, all of whom have in-born tendencies towards excellent pop, tend to smother those instincts in alienating dissonance by way of apologia, as though they feel guilty for their ability to give pleasure. Kevin Barnes, though, is a showman at heart, and his drive to entertain is at least as strong as his drive to challenge his audience. Based on its construction, Skeletal Lamping should be a frustrating, difficult album -- melodic and rhythmic fragments that would qualify as major discoveries for most bands, around which singles and even entire albums could be built, are thrown away in a few seconds -- but the sheer volume of musical ideas contained on the record is staggering and awesome, as is Barnes’ willingness to treat magical, hypnotic melodies as mere ornamentation, appearing and then immediately vanishing into the flood. There's hardly anything resembling a chorus on the record -- once a section is over, it's generally gone for good, as though with this much ground to cover there's no time to reprise anything. In most songs a line like "I want to make you come two hundred times a day" would sound like a joke or a silly boast, but, coming from the creator of an album this sensually rich and dense, it sounds like a good-faith promise.

I suspect that, due to the incredibly bizarre, explicit lyrical content and unusual construction, Skeletal Lamping will not find the wide, boundary-crossing audience it deserves. We will continue to live in an indie-rock landscape in which Art is for the educated and the masochistic, and pop is not supposed to have experimentation, depth or meaning. I’d like to hear "Plastis Wafers" remixed to blare in hip-hop clubs, "Id Engager" in regular rotation on top forty radio. That’s why this is less a review than a form of advertising – I really want you to go out and buy this album. I want the masses to embrace the unusual in a way that they haven’t since the release of OK Computer. Otherwise, this strange and beautiful album will be relegated to the indie rock fans, who will doubtless be suspicious of its overwhelming melodic appeal and immediacy. (Like everybody’s favorite hipster douchebags, Pitchfork, who just hours ago rated it a mediocre 5.9. Sorry, did I say hipster douchebags? I meant to say “hire me please!”)

So, to reiterate: reviews are dumb, and I’m a shill, but don’t let that stop you from going to the store on and buying a copy of Skeletal Lamping. Buy several copies. Give them to your friends as gifts. Keep two for yourself, so you can listen to it in the bedroom and kitchen at the same time. Normally here I’d try to find some clever or poetic line with which to sum up my review, but I’m not trying to be a writer right now; I’m just a fan, telling you about something he loves. So I’ll sign off, in the manner of obsessive, hectoring fans, by repeating myself: buy this album. Even if it doesn't make you come two hundred times a day, it’ll make you feel alive.