Of Montreal isn’t afraid to get a little goofy on record or at their live shows
Terminal 5
610 West 56th St.
Friday, September 17, and Saturday, September 18, $27.50-$30, 8:00
www.myspace.com/ofmontreal
www.terminal5nyc.com
Don’t let the funky grooves flying all over Of Montreal’s tenth album, FALSE PRIEST (Polyvinyl, September 14), fool you; band founder and Apollinaire Rave artistic director Kevin Barnes is still delving deep into suicide, shattered hearts, self-brutality, death anxiety, and loneliness — as well as particle wave duality, auto-da-fés, fetishized archetypes, uncalibrated skulls, frontal lobe regression, and Chinese urine. The Athens, Georgia, group, which has been shuffled and reshuffled over its thirteen-year career, with more former members than current members (and some albums recorded primarily by Barnes alone), has a ball on the new disc, mixing in falsetto funk, rollicking R&B, heavenly dance pop, and Euro-disco that has the sonic glee of Gnarls Barkley — perhaps it is no coincidence that OM has covered GB’s “Crazy.” On FALSE PRIEST, Of Montreal channels a little Beatles here (“You Do Mutilate?”), a whole lot of Prince there (“Like a Tourist,” “Sex Karma”), and even a bit of Bowie to boot (“Godly Intersex”). Janelle Monáe of the Wondaland Arts Society adds groovy raps to “Our Riotous Defects” and “Enemy Gene,” while Solange Knowles gets hot and heavy with Barnes on “Sex Karma,” which features the killer rhyme “You took me centuries to master / In the next life I will have to learn you faster.” Barnes and company — Bryan Poole, Davey Pierce, Dottie Alexander, Clayton Rychlik, Thayer Sarrano, Nicolas Dobbratz, and K Ishibashi — will be headlining Terminal 5 this Friday and Saturday with Kansas native Monáe, who recently released her debut album, THE ARCHANDROID (SUITES II AND III) (Bad Boy, May 18, 2010).