Cold Lampin' with Of Montreal

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After toiling in relative obscurity for nearly a decade, Kevin Barnes’ constantly mutating indie-pop project Of Montreal is finally poised to breach the mainstream. On new album Skeletal Lamping, Barnes navigates a choppy sea of sexuality while shining a spotlight on the strange beasts and angels lurking just beneath his soul’s surface.

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As the early-March sun sets on the Langerado Music Festival, a ninja and a half-dozen masked, body-suited drones—all brandishing heads impaled on spears—dance in 
ecstatic mystery across the stage, the menacing pulse of “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” undulating over the dusk-lit swamps of Florida’s Everglades. In a grand climax to this bizarre ritual taking place on the Big Cypress Seminole reservation, Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes emerges from a coffin almost entirely naked—albeit covered head-to-toe in shaving cream—and steps to the mic to finish the set’s final song.

Afterward, festivalgoers mill about, deer transfixed by the blinding stage lights. I notice a middle-aged man a few yards to my right staring into one of the enigmatic little boxes tossed into the crowd during the show. I wander over, curious, and a bit dazed myself.

“What’s in there?” I ask. He stares back for a moment, then with a quiet perplexity says, “Hair. Real human hair.”

Six months later, Barnes and I are sitting outside Jittery Joe’s Coffee in his hometown of Athens, Ga. While the 34-year-old artist has a pair of impenetrable shades pulled over his eyes, he reminds me less of the shaving-cream-smeared, fish-netted Bowie-in-training he’s become on stage over the last few years, and more of the slightly shy, eccentric DIY indie-pop artist I first interviewed for Athens alt-weekly Flagpole in 2003. “Yes, it’s possible we’re taking away from the music,” he says as we discuss Of Montreal’s Langerado performance, “but I don’t really care. If people just want to hear the songs, they can listen to the record. Most performers aren’t really that ambitious as far as what they want to do for the audience. For this new tour, we’re going to play more with tension and try to create anxiety in the audience, so it’s not always just happiness, but also moments of fear and tension and confusion, which comes closer to the emotional depth we all have within ourselves.”

While Barnes plays with our emotions on tour this fall, he’ll likely be doing so in the guise of that outlandish stage persona. As he wrote in an essay for music blog Stereogum last year (after hipsters nationwide attacked him for appearing in a T-Mobile commercial and selling Of Montreal’s “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games” to Outback Steakhouse as a jingle): In the art industry, it’s extremely difficult to be successful without turning yourself into a cartoon. Even Hunter S. Thompson knew this. God knows Duchamp and Warhol knew it. Some artists are turned into cartoons and others do it themselves. I prefer to do it myself.
 
Barnes blames punk’s obsession with “being real” for indie rock’s often stifling environment. “There’s a lot of pressure to be modest,” he says. “And a lot of people [in that world] are very shy, and feel if someone’s going to be legitimate or genuine, it can’t be pretentious. But I realized it’s fun to be pretentious. Pretentiousness offers freedom. My concept of pretentiousness isn’t phoniness; it’s just role-playing and not having a fixed identity. … I don’t believe it’s possible to be phony. You’re always gonna be who you are. Once I accepted that, I realized, ‘I want to be something fantastic. If I’m gonna create who I am, I don’t want to be this shy, meaningless creature that hasn’t made a splash in the world. I want to be something outrageous and fantastic and inspiring and bizarre.’ In my normal life, I’m very down to earth. I watch ESPN and do a lot of boring things nobody would get excited about.”

Onstage, Of Montreal aims for transformation. Barnes wants people to have “that special moment, like when you see a movie or a painting or read a book that really touches you. The reason it touches you,” he says, “is because it’s jumping out from this other world, and it burns in your memory as something exceptional. And I think that’s the motivation behind Of Montreal’s recordings, as well.”

I am so bored with art that makes sense and “works.” … Very few things pique our interest while they are working as we expect them to. … Shocking people though, just for the sake of it, is so mundane. Nothing on Skeletal Lamping was intended to shock … This record is my attempt to bring all of my puzzling, contradicting, disturbing, humorous... fantasies, ruminations and observations to the surface, so that I can better dissect and understand their reason for being in my head. Hence the title Skeletal Lamping. ‘Lamping’ is the name of a rather dreadful hunting technique where hunters go into the forest at night, flood an area in light, then shoot or capture the animals as they panic and run from their hiding places. This album is my attempt at doing this to my proverbial skeletons. I haven’t yet decided if I should shoot or just capture them though.
—Kevin Barnes, 6/9/2008, myspace.com/ofmontreal

The best way to get your head around Skeletal Lamping’s more challenging aspects is to slowly cycle back through Of Montreal’s albums all the way to 2001’s Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse. This prog-psych opus’ constantly shifting keys and tempos, its disregard for classic pop song structure, and its unchained flights of fancy have a lot in common with the spirit of Of Montreal’s latest. Aldhils Arboretum, the album that followed Coquelicot, did an about-face, embracing standard verse/chorus/verse approach, but it was still chained to the psychedelic sounds of a long-gone era. The biggest shift to date came with 2004’s dancey, New Wave-, disco- and Afropop-influenced Satanic Panic in the Attic, on which—for the first time since 1998’s The Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy—Barnes recorded almost the entire album without his bandmates (who would soon be relegated to “touring members”). As he took the reins for the next two albums, The Sunlandic Twins and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, he honed his electro-pop sound to near-perfection, achieving his first minor financial successes along the way, due to increased ticket and album sales, and the Outback jingle. With his music career beginning to fire on all cylinders, Barnes figured it was time to jam a wrench in the engine.

“The backlash from the Outback commercial really motivated me to push myself, to make something bold and different so people couldn’t marginalize me. When someone calls you a ‘sell-out,’ they’re basically saying you have no value; that you’ve given it up for your bank account—well, I thought, ‘I’m going to prove you wrong. … I can’t sell out because I don’t make music to make money; I make music because I feel compelled to do so.’ This is what gives my life meaning, what gives me a sense of fulfillment.”

On Skeletal Lamping (out Oct. 21 on Polyvinyl, with seven different packaging options), Barnes fused his newer, funkier electro-pop approach with the more progressive ADD vibe of Coquelicot. He still wanted the new album to be accessible, but also more fractured and schizophrenic. “There’s something to say for the classic pop song, but … for a song to be a legitimate, it doesn’t have to fit in a Beatles or Madonna pop template,” he says. “It’s more exciting to just piece all these different movements together. It’s really liberating as a writer to not feel like you have to continue with an idea past its excitement level."

In addition to Skeletal Lamping’s blend of ingratiating hooks and unconventional song structure, one of the album’s most prominent characteristics is its sexually charged lyrical content: “I took her standing in the kitchen, ass against the sink”; “We can do it softcore if you want, but you should know I take it both ways”; “You’re the only one with whom I would role-play Oedipus Rex.” Taken out of context, some of the lyrics can seem overly direct, even offensive. But as the last line suggests, this is far from flippantly pornographic shock-pop. Barnes is exploring the complexities of sexual identity, love, pleasure and the way we relate to our earthly vessels. Take the album’s first single, “Id Engager”: The verses are in direct conflict with the chorus, the way so many people are conflicted within themselves.

“The lyrics in the verse condemn this hedonistic, superficial relationship, and warn people against it,” he says. “But in the chorus, there’s this unapologetic lyric about, ‘I just want to play with you, I don’t care about having a deep relationship. I just want to have a superficial, noncommittal experience.’” Barnes says that many of the lyrics on the new album were inspired by the flamboyant costumes he’s been wearing in concert, and the sexual turn his stage persona took during the Hissing Fauna tour. I ask him about last year’s infamous onstage-disrobing incident. “I feel really relaxed with my body,” he explains. “I could easily be naked right now and not feel insecure. I wasn’t putting myself in this really awkward, vulnerable place because I was totally fine with it. It’s amazing, though: You do something and it’s stamped in time forever. Twenty years from now, it’ll be one of those stories—the way I heard about Iggy Pop rolling around in broken glass. If you wanted to, you could very easily make yourself this huge, iconic figure just by doing wild things and sacrificing your body.”

A lot of people assume Barnes is gay—or at least bi-sexual—because, well, he wears fishnets and makeup on stage. But that’s not the case. “I just like acting really fruity,” he says. “I guess I just don’t really have a sense of, ‘this is the proper way to be.’”

When Barnes was in high school, he thought that the world would be better off if all men were gay. “There’s so much negativity around the male, butch mentality—they’re so uptight,” he explains. “Gay men seemed more open-minded, tolerant and just cooler. And it seemed like this magical, arty world I wanted to be a part of. I was so disappointed when I realized I wasn’t attracted to men physically!

“But I really like playing sports, and a lot of artists aren’t into sports. Most of the guys on my baseball team are straight, so obviously I’m OK with straight people, too. I guess I fall in between gay and straight. There’s probably a lot of people who feel that way. It’s really clichéd, the parameters we put on it. Men and women both have testosterone and estrogen in their bodies—we have the same elements, it’s not like we’re just male or just female. We are this nebulous object, this combination of femininity and masculinity.”