Kevin Barnes, bandleader for of Montreal, is a man possessed of an ever-changing identity. Hats, masks, costumes, uniforms – Barnes has kept his persona as amorphous as the endless changing attractions onstage behind him, which have often incorporated light shows, projections, and not only Barnes’ four-piece backing band, but a troupe of dancers who cycle in and out donning various fantastical outfits while hoisting massive props and set pieces. Hell, Barnes even performed in the nude once upon a time. But for the group’s 2020 album, UR FUN, Barnes has opted to allow one face to shine through more than ever – his own.
While the personal has always appeared in of Montreal’s music, all the way back to when Barnes wrote about the birth of his daughter in ‘So Begins Our Alabee’, it has always felt like the listener was entering a world of Barnes’ creation with an of Montreal record, rather than a shared world in which we all live.
It’s been a wildly successful approach that’s birthed a titanic sixteen studio albums and an equal number of other releases. However, on UR FUN, that changes, and while some of the familiar fantastical elements are absent, this new, dazzlingly honest look at truth of Barnes’ psyche is just as compelling as what’s come before.
Whereas the band’s previous record, the dualistic concept album White is Relic/Irrealis Mood, found Barnes grieving a marriage and trying to unpack and forgive himself for his role in that, UR FUN spotlights a new love, between Barnes and Christina Schneider of the band Locate S,1. The pair features on the cover of the album, and in keeping with the title, it’s an unapologetically poppy and danceable record, finding band members Jojo Glidewell and Nicolas Dobbratz on keys early and often. The album’s sound could be read as an effort to transplant the feelings in Barnes’ heart out onto the dance floor, a feat he puts to the test at the Sinclair nightclub in Cambridge, MA as part of the inaugural tour behind the album.
After an 80s-era PSA about the dangers of inhalant abuse fills the venue, setting a perfectly absurd tone for the night, the show itself begins in the same way as the album, with ‘Peace to All Freaks’, an anthemic mission statement that finds Barnes refusing to accept the lack of empathy he observes in the world. “Don’t let’s be cynical… don’t let’s be bitter” he calls out, asking for the most human of all gestures: “if you feel like you can’t do it for yourself, then do it for us!” In more than two decades at the helm of the band, Barnes has come to be something of an icon among societal outsiders on account of the eccentricity of his music – and years on he’s making an unabashed declaration in support of those folks who, for whatever reason, find themselves unfairly ostracized.
For his part, Barnes walks the walk – shortly before the album’s release he announced via Twitter that he’d be retiring the persona of Georgie Fruit, a character explored in several records in the mid-00s that Barnes described as a transsexual African-American. While the character was clearly intended as benign, and involved only a wardrobe change, he apologized for giving the character “a race & gender [he] had no perspective on”, a move met with appreciation by fans. Barnes is clearly living his ethos of peace, and being boldly genuine about it suits both him and the music.
Perhaps the most unabashed love song on the new album is ‘You’ve Had Me Everywhere’ – setting aside the double entendre of the title, it may be the most heartfelt thing Barnes has ever committed to tape. “Listening to your heartbeat, realizing it’s my heartbeat too,” Barnes croons, and much of the song is spent lamenting that even a whole life isn’t enough time to spend with the one you love, referencing musician Diamanda Galás’ assertion that “mortality is insulting”. And it’s hard to argue – when one has found the love of one’s life, the notion that it will one day evaporate into nothingness does seem like a slap in the face from the very nature of being.
Despite this new approach, Barnes has far from lost his playful mood, it simply expresses itself in a different way. Take ‘Get God’s Attention (by Being an Atheist)’for example, where amid scenes from his relationship Barnes advocates for a lack of caution, throwing oneself to the winds of life with gestures as bombastic and willfully counter-intuitive as courting a deity’s interest with doubt. It’s the infinite possibility of love flowing through him, the kind of love that makes one yearn to experience every little thing life has to offer when it’s found.
Throughout the night, the latest iteration of the band’s live show plays out over a mix of old and new material. Pink primates bear massive reflective discs behind Barnes’ head; a couple dances in shimmering silver masks; there’s an appearance from the band’s long-serving trio of Aztec skulls; and in perhaps the most impressive visual moment of the night, a phalanx of white avian creatures, masked with swirls over their eyes, envelops Kevin in a swirling tempest of sheets as he sings.
Neon dancers accompany Barnes at the front of the stage during ‘Paranoiac Intervals’, a highlight track from White is Relic… that features Barnes’ possessive id as the narrator and contains one of his most memorable hooks from the past decade. To close the main set, bird-men come to the stage and pass a seemingly-endless ribbon of intertwined balloons into the sold-out crowd, stretching into the darkest corners of the dance floor as the audience bops up and down to the gleeful ‘The Party’s Crashing Us’. Crowd-surfers rise to be carried across the room, seemingly with equal ease.
Late in the encore, the penultimate song for the evening, the band bursts into a raucous cover of Nirvana’s classic ‘Breed’. While of Montreal songs vary wildly in tone and tempo, there’s nothing in their discography that would have indicated an interest in flirting so directly with the blunt, distorted sounds of grunge; nor that would have forecast just how successful their brief pivot into that mode would be.
Dobbratz shredded on this guitar, and bassist Davey Pierce took to the air with excitement. Defying expectation, that song somehow melted seamlessly into ‘Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse’, which capped the night with its timeless refrain of “Come on, chemicals!”, a song about cheering on the various neurotransmitters in one’s brain to restore a good disposition – a feeling that just about everyone can understand. It’s the best kind of song to conclude with, as that refrain becomes its own sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, where just hearing it and singing along with hundreds of other people is enough to shift one’s serotonin and dopamine levels a bit more of a positive direction.
Photos and Review by Collin Heroux
