of Montreal's "Skeletal Lamping"

I've only just started listening to of Montreal a month ago, but the sheer brilliance of their October release, "Skeletal Lamping," makes me want to kick myself for not listening to them sooner, because I just missed their SF show. I hear Kevin Barnes puts on an amazingly epic show, with fantastic props and costume changes and backup dancers dressed like Buddhas. This, I suspect, is because he is slightly insane. One listen to "Skeletal Lamping" all but confirms this suspicion: "Skeletal Lamping" is the quirkiest, and most creative album I've heard in a long time. It sounds like nothing else I hear on the radio, and keep in mind that as a Berkeley student, I listen to the most ridiculously self-consciously indie college radio station in existence, a.k.a. KALX 90.7, so I already hear my fair share of the bizarre. Barnes's lyrics often border on the nonsensical, but once you figure out what the hell he's actually saying in that wavering falsetto voice, you can't help but want to sing along. I think "Skeletal Lamping" could be a masterpiece if you looked at the songwriting alone, without even taking into account the complex melodies and instrumental breaks. I sometimes can't even decipher the meaning of the lyrics without a few consultations to Dictionary.com or Wikipedia, with Barnes's use of phrases like "paradigm kisses" or random allusions to Orpheus. The thing that absolutely charms me about of Montreal is how they're never mundane, not even when they're doing something as trite and formulaic as a love song. In "Plastis Wafers," I think it's fantastic how Barnes sings, "You're the only with whom I would role play Oedipus Rex." But no matter how bizarre it gets, the lyrics always make sense. Which is decidedly more than can be said about the melody, which probably violates every existing rule of composition. The songs don't follow the traditional "verse-chorus-verse" structure, and for many of them, you'd be hard pressed to identify a chorus at all. Many of the songs are interrupted with chaotic instrumental breaks, and then continue on sounding like a completely different song. I typically have a hard time figuring out when a song has ended and the next one has begun, and when I was listening to "Wicked Wisdom," I checked my iTunes window about three times because each time I thought I had started a new song. So listening to of Montreal is sometimes a bit confusing, and always thoroughly weird, but it's a really enjoyable experience, mostly because it's just so refreshingly different from everything else you've been listening to for your entire life.