Of Montreal’s Little Red Coquette
Right – the Prince stuff. Let’s start there. “Our Riotous Defects,” track two of False Priest, Kevin Barnes’s 11th album either with or as Of Montreal, channels Prince in a way that’s even more direct than usual. Over the last few Of Montreal albums, Barnes hasn’t been shy about his desire to come as close as possible to that sound and standard while still remaining his weirdo, hyperkinetic, Athens, Georgia-bred indie-pop self. But he’s seldom imitated him so directly as he does on “Defects” – specifically, the verses are done in an exacting, precise imitation of the spoken coda of “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” from Sign ‘O’ the Times.
Especially on Sign, Prince was entirely comfortable tweaking his own persona – playing it up here, undercutting it slightly there. Nothing about the “Girlfriend” coda, in which Prince’s voice is slightly sped up, is un-self-aware. But Barnes’s use of that nattering tone is utilized in the service of a bunch of lines that up the self-awareness factor a few notches: “I know it’s fucked, but just before we got together, I even hooked up with one of your cousins just to feel somehow closer to you. ‘Cause I knew, like, you guys were best friends and you talked every day, and it was thrilling to touch something that had touched you.” Sure, he’s singing to the “crazy girl” of the chorus (“I supported your stupid little blog, got a Bowflex,” he recounts, bewildered), but he’s also singing, as a listener, to Prince himself, about hearing yourself in another person’s song – or of wanting to get inside that song and make it your own.
Jon Brion helped produce False Priest; two songs feature Janelle MonÃ�e; one has Solange Knowles. “Thick R&B influence” were Barnes’s words to Pitchfork. It’s not a surprise to see Brion in that company – his work with Fiona Apple got the attention of a lot of R&B fans even before he worked with Kanye West on Late Registration in 2005. But Brion brings a buffeting style that meshes well with Barnes’s hyperkineticism. The last Of Montreal album, 2008′s Skeletal Lamping, was dense and jagged and sharp-edged; False Priest goes down smoothly without diluting any of what makes Of Montreal it billowing, weird self.
But what Brion really brings out – and I now feel foolish for not hearing it earlier – is how very high-school-musical Of Montreal is. That makes sense: The band was spawned from Elephant 6′s collectivist ethos, which Stars and Arcade Fire seem to have picked up, and those groups have a similar gang-putting-on-a-show aspect as well. Of course, the reason I feel foolish noticing this now is that Of Montreal are always in costume and makeup. They use stage props, for Christ’s sake. Their last album was narrative about Georgie Fruit, a black transsexual character that hybridizes earlier, more unaffectedly heroic rock archetypes from Bowie on out.
Archetypes and icons are Barnes’s lyrical preoccupation. (The False Priest itself is an archetype – think of Jimmy Swaggart begging forgiveness of his sins.) “I thought she was my Annie Hall, or at least Ali MacGraw,” he sings on “Famine Affair,” which despite its Sly Stone-tweaking title could have been on a Blondie record. “How can I trust my fractious heart/ When I know I have the enemy gene?” he and MonÃ�e ask together on “Enemy Gene.” (Rather than showing off, MonÃ�e slips easily and well into a helpmate role both here and on “Defects.”) There’s always something askew in his universe, though he’s happy to dance around it – and indeed, the music sounds spryer than it has since 2005′s The Sunlandic Twins.
“Enemy Gene” is lovely, almost Christmassy pop in early Todd Rundgren mode – and Barnes has a lot in common with Rundgren. Both are smart, and smart-alecky, multi-instrumentalist studio rats with a taste for R&B and the off-kilter. Bringing Brion into the mix just makes it more apparent. The squee-sliding synths that climax “Hydra Fancies” are the kind of touch you’d expect from Something/Anything?; on an earlier Of Montreal album they might seem harsher. Here they fizz with delight.
Martin may sound a bit silly singing, “You look like a playground to me, playa,” on “Sex Karma,” his duet with Knowles the younger. But his weirdo take on R&B really does groove when that’s what he’s aiming for. “Girl Named Hello” is a bustling disco track – it could have come out on P&P around 1980 – that features Barnes doing a few voices (curling falsetto, absent-minded rasp) to make it sound all the more offhanded. Then there’s “Like a Tourist,” the album’s other big Prince swipe – the wide-swinging drum track effectively channels Graffiti Bridge while the haughty, throaty spoken stuff is closer to the snide parts of “Sexuality.” I almost expect Barnes to say, “What? No flash again?” But on this album, that wouldn’t be the case at all.
