Album Review: Skeletal Lamping

An Analysis of Indie Pop Renovators Of Montreal's Ninth Studio LP

Oct 20, 2008

Of Montreal has always been a strange band, but Skeletal Lamping takes this to a new level. Filled with short bursts of ideas and songs, the album is wacky and endearing.

Kevin Barnes, the mastermind behind six-piece indie pop band Of Montreal, has never been one for subtlety. Following up to their 2007 charting album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Barnes has written Skeletal Lamping, a CD practically schizophrenic in nature which further explores his alter ego, Georgie Fruit.

The album is overflowing with ideas, some which drastically change direction in the middle of a song and others which bleed into subsequent tracks. It is hard to give the album a single genre or even concept, but it serves as an outlet for the bizarre side of Barnes and company.

One of the most interesting features of Skeletal Lamping is its song structure. Although the album is broken up into fifteen tracks, songs are further dissected by Barnes' desire to explore as many themes and genres as possible.

The opener “Nonpareil of Favor”, goes from a harpsichord-based love song backed by an ecstatic drum machine to an indie pop singalong reminiscent of the band's last single “Heimdalsgate like a Promethean Curse” before descending into discordant noise rock. The rest of the album is equally two-faced, and some songs will go through five or six shifts before the track changes.

While the nature of the album allows Of Montreal to touch upon many themes and styles of music, the album also sticks to their roots: incredibly danceable indie pop. Every song features an incessant upbeat drum machine at some point, as well as Barnes' stratospheric vocals.

But the band has broadened their horizons on the album to include a strong funk influence, which plays off Barnes' alter ego Georgie Fruit, a “black she-male” who was introduced at the end of Hissing Fauna and serves as a sexual foil to Barnes' despondent persona.

Barnes and Of Montreal Compress Album, Almost to Fault

The only definitive problem with Of Montreal's voyage into the truly bizarre is the lack of constancy that comes with some tracks. For instance, the ninety-second piano ballad “Touched Something's Hollow” has no time to develop before it explodes into “An Eluardian Instance”, a love song full of horns and hand-claps. Barnes meant for the transitions on Skeletal Lamping to be jarring, but this somewhat limits the album's development, hiding a few brilliant fragments in the middle of a completely different song.

With the multi-faceted nature of Skeletal Lamping, more than a few things can get lost in the flow. It's improbable that Barnes intended for this CD to be easy to listen to (or even entirely decipherable) but most aspects of it will not become clear on the first listen. From the massive amounts of innuendo in “Triphallus, to Punctuate!” to the story Georgie Fruit spins in “Women's Studies Victims”, the album actively tries to be both difficult to listen to and endearing, and the result is something that a listener will either love or hate.

9.0/10—Skeletal Lamping is an oxymoronic album; one that is catchy and witty but also demands time to fully understand. However, Of Montreal flirts with disaster to incredible results. The songs are deep and above all weird. It will not appeal to everybody, but it is still impossible not to acknowledge the creative talent that went into its production.

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