Of Montreal (Boston Phoenix, 9/7/10)

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: From the ’90s-era Elephant 6 days to this month’s release of 10th studio album False Priest, Of Montreal have stoked a flamboyant fire in indie rock.

“I’ve always been drawn to a density of ideas,” states Kevin Barnes, plaintively. If you have even a passing familiarity with Barnes and the music he’s made for the past 15-plus years with his glammed-out-chamber-pop Athens (Georgia) ensemble Of Montreal, then you probably retorted to that line with an emphatic “Duh!” If you aren’t familiar with the man, let me spell it out: Barnes’s music is overstuffed with “a density of ideas” the way Picasso’s Cubist paintings occasionally had some cubes in them. It’s all part of how he fills every microsecond of every Of Montreal song with little pieces and parts and zigs and zags, until listening to one becomes a minefield of whizzing thoughts and changes.

Placed in context, Barnes’s kitchen sink fits: as a somewhat latter-day participant in the loose collective of bands and musicmakers known as Elephant 6, Of Montreal were of a kind with fellow over-creators like Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Apples in Stereo. “When I was around all of those guys, in the ’90s,” he explains, “the idea when making an album was, you know, ‘Just fill that CD up with as much material as possible!’ Seventy-two minutes, or whatever the limit is! I was surrounded by all these creative people bounding with all of this stuff, and it seemed a shame if you made an album and it was only 45 minutes.”

Even from the start, though, there was always a crucial distinction between the doe-eyed psych of the rest of Elephant 6 and the restless theatricality of Barnes and Of Montreal. Perhaps it was the way that “Panda Bear” (from 1998′s Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy) and “Jacques Lamure” (from 1999′s The Gay Parade) veer off in a thousand directions, each refracting bright light or dark matter, depending on how hard you listened. Or maybe it was the way Barnes was beginning to inhabit quasi–alter egos in order to discover new methods of expression.

“For a while,” he says, “I had a lot of musical ideas that were all about falsetto singing and sort-of-sexual content. So I kind of used these other characters as a device — but it’s organic, it’s just this thing that sort of happens, a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing. I sort of become this character, and I’m familiar with that character, and I don’t censor it, I don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I can’t say that in a song.’ Instead, it’s like, ‘Oh hell, yeah, okay, I’m gonna do this now.’ It’s really exciting and liberating and empowering in a strange way.”

Most Barnes-ologists would place the moment of his ultimate liberation at the release of the band’s eighth album, 2007′s bizarrely accessible Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Not that the band hadn’t been moving in accessible and revelatory directions, starting with 2004′s darkly playful Satanic Panic in the Attic (try listening to that album and getting the twisted chorus to “Chrissy Kiss the Corpse” out of your head) and going on with 2005′sThe Sunlandic Twins, wherein you might surprise yourself by tapping your toes to songs with titles like “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games).” But Hissing Fauna is where Barnes got personal — and unleashed Georgie Fruit. The album’s success not only put a newfound spotlight on the band, it had pundits scratching their chins at this bizarre persona, who rears his pan-sexual head in the midst of Fauna magnum opus “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal.”

“People somehow think that personas are not genuine,” Barnes explains. “But I don’t agree. I think that there’s nothing you can do that isn’t a part of you, there’s nothing you can do that isn’t genuine.”

Perhaps it was all part of coming to grips with success after years of fighting perceived failure, or at least a lack of acceptance. “My first record, Cherry Peel, was a very personal, and it got slammed across the board by what little press it got. It was like being beat up on the first day of school. The next day, you think, ‘Fuck it, I’m not talking to anybody, I’m gonna keep my head down and wear all black.’ And my way to wear all black was to don a kaleidoscopic trenchcoat — because I think that there is always a part of me that needs to hide in an alternate reality.”

Barnes’s latest retreat into a world of his own creation, the lavish and majestic False Priest (Polyvinyl), shows indications of his fissure with ’60s psychedelia, as the blatant new wave and funk of tracks like album opener “I Feel Ya Strutter” and “Godly Intersex” see him dip his toe in the pool of conventional hitmaking. But don’t be fooled by those indicators — for every tease of “normality,” there is a bizarre dunk in the weird tank like album closer/headscratcher “You Do Mutilate,” a mutant that displays Barnes’s recent infatuation with all things P-Funk.

“Yeah, I feel like we don’t make it easy for people to like us. I think we’re a very polarizing band in that way. A lot of people might have actually liked us if we had seemed less pretentious or less theatrical. Like, you know, if they were stuck on a desert island with the records, they had no references, no concept of what we were about, it might be easier to like them if it was just the songs. I think when some people see the whole thing, the presentation and the way we are — we aren’t the kind of band that just anyone can love.”

OF MONTREAL + JANELLE MONAE | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | September 16 at 7 pm | $25-$35 | 888.693.2583 or hob.com/boston

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