“When you think about it, a lot of hip-hop artists come across like they have no social skills,” Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes mused to me last year. “They brag about how good they are, and how much better they are than everyone else, and how much money they’ve made in a way that we’ve all been raised to not to do. You’re raised to think that if you brag about how awesome you are, nobody’s going to want to talk to you, but in hip-hop, it’s perfectly cool.”
I’ve heard several rock songwriters express similar jealousy over the creative freedom that rap music affords, but I’ve never actually seen one take similar license in their songs until Barnes.
Barnes argues that most songwriters—most artists, really—use their art to present themselves in the most flattering way possible, in his own words “they try to transcend their ugliness through their art.” Barnes, however, longed to embrace that ugliness, and found a way to play up his inner arrogance and small-mindedness by creating an id-driven character to flaunt this nastiness: George Fruit, a bratty, hyper-sexual, glam-rock alter-ego. Georgie Fruit first appeared on Of Montreal’s 2007 disc Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, where for better of worse he carried the disc’s second half, chasing women and telling them off in decidedly un-PC terms. (That Fruit is an African American lends the shtick an extra element of danger—Barnes had Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder beat by a good year.)
This week Of Montreal releases its follow-up to Hissing Fauna, Skeletal Lamping, an album entirely dominated by the Fruit character. Early reviews have been mixed, but I imagine that’s in part because Of Montreal has earned the critical benefit of the doubt. If past Of Montreal records weren’t so stunning, the reviews for Skeletal Lamping would be savage.
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For all its imagination, Skeletal Lamping is an obnoxious, unlikable album. As Fruit, Barnes plays the crass, unwelcome house guest who puts his penis on any and everything, testing the patience of his gracious hosts. The music is similarly exhausting, as Barnes consciously skirted pop song structures in favor of short snippets that come and go, seldom repeating themselves as they build one daunting, illogical, hour-long suite. Even when the experiment works, it still feels like an experiment.
With Skeletal Lamping, Of Montreal has crafted the first live-band Girl Talk album, but instead of using hits we know and love, he’s used alien songs that beg us to hate them.
