photos by Tanya Paglia: click HERE to see the full photo gallery
Anyone in show business will tell you that it’s hard work putting on a show, and the psychic toll it takes on one over a prolonged career is usually palpable. For Kevin Barnes and his troupe of merrymakers, 15 years in the trenches of psychedelic indie rock has clearly been a journey of liberation and exploration; but in their path to becoming the airtight jesters of the evening that strolled through The Paradise on Wednesday night, it was clear that there has always been a building sadness beneath the funtime hijinks. The show began with a prank, as stagehands took to the stage in animal masks and played several minutes of assaultive noise before being ejected by the “real” band, at which point we got to see the 2010 Kevin Barnes: bearded and eyeshadowed with a headwrap that, combined with his trademark Britwarble, made him come across like Brett Anderson of The London Suede auditioning for Johnny Depp’s role in Pirates of the Caribbean.
As the band rammed through it’s cavalcade of jaunty poppers, with two gigantic projection screens behind them displaying intentionally trippy visual accompaniment, the cartoon vibe of the band’s attack was palpable. Of Montreal’s music is truly schizophrenic– or maybe it’s more of a dissociative identity disorder, as a thousand different bands crowd the mirror trying to get equal time in the setlist. That said, I think the band can in some ways be summed up as being, musically, truly Bowie-esque: in the sense that they roughly cover all of the musical genres of Bowie’s career, whether it’s the arch 70′s glam rock of the Ziggy era, the hippy folk of his 60′s “Space Oddity” period, “Young Americans” Philly soul/disco, the Krautrock of the 70′s Eno era, all the way through the Never Let Me Down synthy 80′s and the spiky guitar weirdness of Tin Machine. But despite all the complications, as Barnes giddily bounced up and down in time with the effervescent cuddlerock attack perpetrated by his band, one couldn’t help but appreciate the sheer exuberance that this band is capable of. With nary a moment between tunes, the band pushed ever onward with an airless campaign of nonstop capital-F fun that was really a sight to behold. The mirror eventually broke, however, with the one-two punch of ”Spike The Senses” (from 2004′s Satanic Panic in the Attic) and newer number “Plastis Wafers”:; Barnes put his guitar down and began vamping like a vogueing diva, culminating in “Wafers”s glam meltdown: “You know you’re a fucking star, you know you are,” he pleaded, showing his own fragility through the pomp and glitter of the band’s psych artifice. It was as genuine a public moment as a man in hot pink skinny jeans can have.
