If there's any lingering suspicion that alter ego Georgie Fruit was merely an offhand whimsy by Kevin Barnes-- just tongue-in-cheek self-mystification-- Skeletal Lamping will clear things up. Last year's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? was so rich with cathartic pop goodness it's easy to forget Barnes supposedly morphed into a middle-aged African-American transsexual midway through the album. And he hasn't yet changed back. Longtime fans still hoping for a return to The Gay Parade or Cherry Peel days of innocence may want to stop reading, because Skeletal Lamping roofies Hissing Fauna's back half to live out Barnes', er, Georgie's sexual fantasies.
However, the story with Skeletal Lamping isn't Barnes' role playing, but its relentlessly schizophrenic composition. Although broken into 15 tracks, the album seems like nearly an hour of song fragments. The pop hooks are still there, but like the similarly kaleidoscopic material of the Fiery Furnaces or even Girl Talk, Skeletal Lamping can be utterly exhausting, even at its most fun-loving.
The album starts harmlessly with the fractured but hummable one-two punch of "Nonpareil of Favor" and "Wicked Wisdom" before "For Our Elegant Caste"-- which contains one of the most annoying choruses of the year-- kicks off the album's convoluted middle section. Excepting the 90-second Elton John coke crash "Touched Something's Hollow", this middle portion whips the listener through a rollercoaster of orgasms, hangovers, and euphoria, leaving no time in between for a breather. Georgie's funk persona-- he played in a 70s funk band named Arousal apparently-- feels most apropos on the Prince bedroom ballad "St. Exquisite's Confessions", but the laidback tempo doesn't allow Barnes to spew his typical 100 hooks per minute, making the track his most by-the-numbers genre hop.
The brief teases of Barnes' melodic mastery will probably frustrate even more than Lamping's clunkers. Single "Id Engager" closes the album on a surprisingly carefree note, concluding the twisted sexual odyssey with the one song that could've passed prima facie on Hissing Fauna. The stunning chorus on "Plastis Wafers" meanders through disco and cock rock with equal grace, but requires the listener to suffer wandering passages that help push the track over seven minutes. "Wicked Wisdom" finds Georgie not yet a full-blown lothario, and his sympathetic naiveté, whether lamenting his struggles to connect with girls or flaunting his puppy love, is reinforced by gumball hooks ranging from power-pop to psychedelic melodrama.
Ultimately Skeletal Lamping registers as a misstep, but not without loads of silver lining. For one, Kevin Barnes has established himself as the anti-Christ to the polite, erudite indie world, and for all this album's shortcomings, it's a breath of fresh air for those bored by ivory tower indie rock. For that matter, with an overblown live show replete with costume changes, skits, video screens, etc., Of Montreal's hardly pretending to be an album-oriented act anymore, making Lamping feel like a soundtrack to a much more interesting movie. Coming off his magnum opus, it's understandable Barnes takes a victory lap here, but his mad genius-- no matter how outwardly freewheeling and escapist-- sounds better wrung through some semblance of a conventional pop filter.
