Photo of Kevin Barnes by Phil Bardi; to see a bunch more pics by freelance photographer elawgrrl, click here.
Of Montreal’s stage show is an aural and visual hallucination brought to dazzling life. I could spend a few thousand words describing it in colorful detail and still manage to leave out plenty.
The six-member band played against a huge backdrop of vivid, psychedelic animations and under washes of saturated lights. Two sets of drums were mounted on risers on either side of the stage and a revolving screen set up between them hid-or-revealed a motley cast of performers, who acted out all manner of scenes and scenarios with and without frontman Kevin Barnes, and in costumes and masks that ranged from cute to freakish. Barnes himself disappeared behind the screen to change outfits a dozen or more times, from fur to sequins to spandex to centaur, a performer serving as his second set of legs for that last ensemble. He covered himself in red paint, in shaving cream, in glitter. He sang and played guitar, pranced from one side of the stage to the other in nothing but a pair of sassy gold trunks, climbed up a riser to sing from its heights or play drums a few minutes, climbed back down to be executed in a faux-gallows, and appeared to have a grand old time all throughout.
The 90-minute show included most of the songs from Of Montreal’s latest, Skeletal Lamping, as well as several crowd pleasers from the three albums — “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse,” and “She’s a Rejector” from Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, “Eros' Entropic Tundra” off Satanic Panic in the Attic, and from The Sunlandic Twins, “So Begins Our Alabee” and “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games,” the latter the song so infamously changed into the Outback jingle and only recently brought back into rotation.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2008.