Satanic Panic in the Day-Glo S&M Chamber

Eat Skittles and puke

To describe Of Montreal's new album, Skeletal Lamping as a Prince-ified version of 2006's acerbic-yet-saccharine Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is perfectly valid. That record, which ostensibly dealt, in part, with front man Kevin Barnes' divorce, was a minor masterpiece, leavening its heavily psychedelic bent with power pop concision and a handful of emotional truth bombs, including the epic, scarifying "The Past is a Grotesque Animal." It's therefore tempting to view Hissing Fauna as the chrysalis and Skeletal Lamping as the butterfly - a perspective reinforced by the latter's underlying conceit: Kevin Barnes, 34 year-old white male as alter-ego Georgie Fruit, a middle-aged black transsexual, a transformation alleged to have occurred halfway through Hissing Fauna and carried on here, with gusto. I guess you had to read the lyric sheet.

In all seriousness though, evaluating Skeletal Lamping based upon the Georgie Fruit concept is akin to saying that you liked Ziggy Stardust because of the plot. What you hear on the record when you're not sifting through the entrails for astrological data is pure stylistic hyperbole, the kind of stop-on-a-dime shifts in tempo and mood that the Fiery Furnaces, to beat a well-loved dead horse, would kill to be able to pull off. Songs on Skeletal Lamping bend, blend, and coalesce to the point where you have to keep checking iTunes to see what song actually is playing (a treat for all you mix tape makers out there); the effect is a non-danceable dance record, which may seem a contradiction in terms, but enables Barnes & Co. to connect not only with the id (read: ass), but on a higher intellectual plane as well (not a value judgment about dance music, I assure you). Sure, Skeletal Lamping fails to raise the emotional stakes that made its predecessor so unexpectedly harrowing, but no matter. It's a logical step forward for a band sloughing off indie rock conventionality for pop omnivorousness, and only someone gorging on Hater-Ade could begrudge Of Montreal the leap. After all, girls, and evidently middle-aged black transsexuals, just want to have fun.

P.S.: For today only, you can pick up the record fo $3.99 at Amazon mp3.