The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts October 13, 2007

Of Montreal Takes the Stage Dressed in Its Finest

Before Of Montreal took the stage in Hales on Monday, a man flailing his arms and wearing a tiger head ran across it. This was just a preview for the antics that define an Of Montreal show. Next entered the band. Front-man singer/guitarist Kevin Barnes wore teal hot pants with matching fishnets and boots. To complete the ensemble, he wore a dense layer of sparkly-teal panda-like eye makeup. Thousands of tiny light brown hairs stuck out in all directions through the holes in Barnes’s leg-wear, confirming the answer to the question that has plagued us all: Does Barnes shave his legs?

None of the other band members quite capture the same hot, sexual majesty that Barnes brought to the performance, but they too looked as if they had just stepped off a UFO that was aimed for Oberlin College. Dottie Alexander, keyboardist and occasional cowbell player, wore a purple tutu-esque dress with teal fishnets that matched Barnes’. Bryan Poole (who also uses the name the Late B.P. Helium) sported giant black wings, long sideburns and played a white guitar decorated with blue and red stars, leaving one to wonder where exactly he had descended from. The bassist, Matt Dawson, and drummer, Jamey Huggins, wore matching vests and ties, thus completing Of Montreal’s extravagant indie image.

Of Montreal, actually of Athens, GA,  has been around since mid-1997. Since then, the band members have changed, as has their sound. Barnes, who has been around since the beginning, is undeniably the mastermind behind the band and this fact seems obvious on stage as he saunters around resembling David Bowie. He presented a flamboyant theatrical show filled with skipping and clapping his hands while jumping up and down, even ending one track with a move that resembled the pose “Blue Steel” in Zoolander. His performance worked smoothly for the majority of the show, but occasionally, Barnes seemed exhausted by the moves he performs night after night while on tour. 

This apathy and disinterest on Barnes’s part reflect the more melancholy lyrics that dominate Of Montreal’s most recent releases, Hissing Fauna, Are You My Destroyer? and its sister EP, Icons, Abstract Thee. These albums chronicle his psychological struggles and marital demise. With lines like “I’m in a crisis, I need help / Come on mood shift, / Shift back to good again,” Barnes’s gloomy cynicism becomes obvious. 

But the exuberant synth-driven beats lure Of Montreal fans in before the superficial coating of Barnes’s songs ever becomes evident. In the moments when Barnes did look robotic on stage, the lyrics, “All the party people dancing for the indie star / But he’s the worst faker by far / But in the set, I forget all of the beauty’s wasted,” seemed to be clearly a line of dismal self-critique. 

Also encompassing and enhancing the theatrics of the performance were three screens in the background displaying at once disturbing, amusing and beautiful cartoon-drawn scenes. Often, the images portrayed awkward erotic episodes, with hands moving to uncharted territory and faces sucking one another. The most unsettling image was of two white men dressed in sailor suits making out with two Chinese women who were looking off into the distance, uninterested. These images reflected the feeling of the band’s entire performance in their contradictory nature.

MGMT, the first opening band, was also notable; any band that can successfully sing about electric eels has my stamp of approval. Outside of Hales, one could hear the group’s music beckoning to the young minds of Oberlin like church bells to the pious on a Sunday. 

Founding members of MGMT Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser first got together in 2002 at Wesleyan University. They performed with a five-piece band that had a stunning presence on stage. Although much less theatrical than Of Montreal, the drummer did try to step it up by wearing a bowler hat while neglecting to put on a shirt. The band created indie-pop songs with absurd and interesting lyrics that got the small crowd moving about. 


 
 
   

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