As it happens often for bands I get to see, I had zero experience with Of Montreal, and it was way too much to digest at once. I remember nothing from their performance at Filter magazine’s Culture Collide, or rather too much, which is about the same, since thoughts jostle and jump at the same time in my brain one day after, and I still don’t know what I heard or saw.
Actually, I can’t remember about the music because I was too distracted by everything that was going on, between the gas-mask-wearing E.T., the female aliens showing off their enormous fake boobs, the acrobatic zombie-ghosts (or were they mummies?) and their white balloons, the masked Mexican wrestlers, the trumpeter bunny, the Alice-in-wonderland click, the crowd surfing Spiderman, how did they want me to focus on the music? But you know what, I think their music was at the image of that non-sense-bric-a-brac-mind-fuck circus, there was a little bit of everything, it was crazy, and there was no way I would have been able to characterize the sound even though I had concentrated.
Visuals were transforming the show into a living acid trip for the crowd’s immense pleasure, and there obviously were big fans front row, who knew all the lyrics and had an absolute great time. All right, I got it, these Of Montreal guys play it like the Flaming Lips meets Sesame Street meets any hallucinogen you want to want to indulge in, and actually I don’t understand why all these people were smoking weed – the smell was intense, even though it was an outdoor concert – the trip was happening on stage and there was absolutely no need of any other sense enhancer.
Wearing a blue kimono and a Skrillex haricut, Kevin Barnes – or rather Barnum at this point – was directing his mind’s phantasmagoric delirium, alternating between guitar and piano and sipping from a wine (?) bottle between songs, without even looking at all these strange characters improvising stunts on stage. Me, I wasn’t even much paying attention to the other musicians – hey I was too distracted by these aliens’ boobs – but the five of them were also part of the ambient eccentricity, wearing psychedelic outfits or fluo high socks.
The music was happy party-time with joyous and bouncy beats, often without even a comprehensible melody, hard to follow in a way, with unexpected outbursts, and some melodic-harmonic Beatles-que parts, totally discordant, fun marching band or ambulant circus, clever colorful collage, going nowhere, going everywhere. But when I thought I had them figured out as crazy non-sense melody-makers with a severe case of ADD, they threw this totally groovy-super-catchy song called ‘Wraith Pinned to the Mist’!
Like the enchained sausage balloons they released away during their last and extended song ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’, creating a crazy and powerful visual of giant tentacles taking over the crowd, the music was bubbly, playful, and glam powerful, but it was also hiding some gloominess behind all that clapping and bounciness… Tonight I still don’t know what I saw, and if it was any indication of what’s going on in Kevin Barnes’ mind, the guy probably never gets bored.
Setlist
· Plastis Wafers
· St. Exquisite's Confessions
· Oslo in the Summertime
· Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider
· Spiteful Intervention
· We Will Commit Wolf Murder
· Wraith Pinned to the Mist
· Coquet Coquette
· An Eluardian Instance
· Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse
· She's A Rejecter
· The Past is a Grotesque Animal
