Of Montreal: “Id Engager”

Of Montreal: "Id Engager"

I am always fascinated and entertained by artists who follow their muse. The ones who follow them everywhere. Artists who don't stop at the cliff's edge, but ones who dive off of it into the black depths of the ocean, emerging from time-to-time with a new artifact. Sometimes those artifacts are brilliant pieces of beauty and truth and sometimes those artifacts are mangled heaps that contain potential insights but are buried and twisted by nonsense.

Works that come to mind by artists who have continued on after their muse are Finnegans Wake, The Waves, Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable, Inland Empire, Southland Tales, Star Wars, Blueberry Boat, Smile, and Loveless. Some of these are brilliant, some impenetrable and some messy. All are fascinating.

Of Montreal's forthcoming album, Skeletal Lamping, finds leader Kevin Barnes, if not diving after that muse (which is possibly one raped by Rapture), certainly standing side-by-side with it at the edge. I have yet to hear the entire album in it's finalized capacity, but I've heard most of the tracks that will be included upon it. They continue on with the indie-dance-pop they've been bringing since Satanic Panic in the Attic, when Barnes fully took hold of the group, incorporating more of the disco/funk/r&b sounds from Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? tracks like "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" and "Faberge Falls for Shuggie". Other elements from Fauna, like Barnes' character/alter-ego Georgie Fruit, and the dynamic shifts within songs, have also become more prominent on Lamping. (See here for more excellent impressions of Skeletal Lamping tracks.)

"Id Engager", the first single and last track on the album, is in the indie-pop/disco vein, sonically similar to "The Party's Crashing Us", from 2005's The Sunlandic Twins. An immediately catchy and fun dance track with Barnes (in character?) stating, "I can't help it if it's true/Don't wanna be your man/Just wanna play with you".

This track, and the others I've heard, have me really excited about the strange brilliance of Skeletal Lamping and where Kevin Barnes' muse leads him next.