(The Surrealists Were Just) Nihilists With Good Imaginations

Of Montreal @ Irving Plaza 3/9/2007
Suffer For Fashion / Sink The Seine / Cato As A Pun / Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse / Labyrinthian Pomp / She’s A Rejecter / We Were Born The Mutants Again With Leafling / October Is Eternal / I Was A Landscape In Your Dream / Vegan In Furs / Du Og Meg / Climb The Ladder / Tropical Iceland (with a bit of And She Was) / Forecast Fascist Future / I Was Never Young / Rapture Rapes The Muses / Gronlandic Edit / A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger / The Party’s Crashing Us // Bunny Ain’t No Kind Of Rider / Faberge Falls For Shuggie / Moonage Daydream / Requiem For OMM2

Of Montreal “Bunny Ain’t No Kind Of Rider” (Live @ Irving Plaza 3/9/2007) – Of Montreal’s current live show is essentially a low-budget surrealist potluck cabaret. It comes together as a delightfully incoherent mess of glam styles, performance art signifiers and mythological references, and part of the reason it works is because there is absolutely no pretense of theme or narrative. Instead, it all just comes off like a bunch of very smart people gleefully dressing up in outlandish costumes and indulging in artsy silliness without ever seeming smug, or letting the irony taint the emotional and intellectual content of the show. There was a strong sense that everyone on stage felt liberated by their whole-hearted embrace of an absurd camp aesthetic, and that they all were very excited about whatever they were bringing to the show. “Oooh, I’ll wear my fishnets and for one song dress up like an enormous wizard, like Peter Gabriel would have done if he only ever wore costumes made out of stuff from his dad’s garage!” “Hey, I’ll wear my angel wings!” “Cool, I’ll be the guy who slinks around in a skintight white body suit, and you can drop bananas down into my crotch during the encore!”

Of Montreal “Tropical Iceland” (Live @ Irving Plaza 3/9/2007) – I’m reasonably certain that Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? is my favorite album since 2003 — or to be specific, since the Fiery Furnaces released Gallowsbird’s Bark. That said, I probably don’t need to explain why it was so exciting for me to see Of Montreal perform one of the best songs from that record, or why it made me so glad that Kevin Barnes loves their work and recognizes the Friedberger siblings as being his “contemporaries.” (Let’s be very honest: neither he nor they have many true peers in this era.) “Tropical Iceland” is an inspired cover, in part because the single version sounds so much like something Barnes might have written himself, but also because its melody flatters his slippery voice and fake British accent. Is there any chance that we can get the Furnaces to have a go at “Wraith Pinned To The Mist (And Other Games)”?

(Big thanks to Dan Lynch.)

Elsewhere: Pageblank on unrequited love.