Record Review: of Montreal – Skeletal Lamping

Of Montreal-Skeletal Lamping [Polyvinyl], Released October 21st 

 

When I sat down to listen to this album my good buddy Frank and I drank a pint of acid and got ourselves extremely comfortable and naked in a barricaded motel room. Frank didn’t make it, but not before writing all over the walls “When bread becomes toast it can never go back to being bread” with a magic marker he smuggled in. This experience, along with the loss of Frank, may have skewed my view of the album permanently. Here are some thoughts I have retained. 

Skeletal Lamping, the ninth studio release of Athens, Georgia’s of Montreal is an Elephant 6 influenced, twitchy compilation of thirty nine miniature songs of semi-related topics that were manipulated in a rock orchestra style to develop a sporadic fifteen track entity. Back to my subtle bread and toast metaphor, to me, the album is related to their 2007 release “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?” as John Cameron Mitchell’s “Shortbus” is related to “Hedwig and the Angry Itch” in an orgy filled, masturbation fueled, type of succession.

The first couple tracks include some of the more interesting chanted lyrical excerpts such as, “I’m just a black shemale, and I don’t know what you people are all about,” and, “We can do it softcore is you want, but you should know I take it both ways”. Naturally, this second line is followed up by a smoothly panned afrobeat percussion segment acutely skewed into the track. “Touched Something Hollow” is a brief, mellow piano driven interlude that is reminiscent of something like Will Cullen Hart singing an Elliott Smith tune, asserting that Olivia Tremor Control and The Zombies influence that is so recognizable with of Montreal. This track stood out for me, as well as “St. Exquisite’s Confessions”, which opened with a smooth introduction wrought with a perfect combination of overtly pornographic lyrical blends and backing harmonies, meanwhile not overloading the senses with their style of ear-bleeding schizopop. Unfortunately this eventually breaches into a Bowie meets space rock jam, and of course turns into yet another distinct song entirely before the track actually ends. 

Simply put, “Plastis Wafers” is too freaking long. It kicks off as a kind of disco pop with clear influences from the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack (and cross-dressing parties). This of course changes into eight different other songs by the end of its seven minute duration. This song, like the album as a whole, feels slightly forced and attention deficit, despite its rare, brevity struck moments when it all seems to come together very nicely. 

Fabakis Rating: 6.3 (or if you prefer, how I would visually describe the album)

On the Greatness of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea: Part I

This is the first post in an occasional series where I will do my best to provide insight into rock music’s magnum opus, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The title is adapted from Stephen Booth’s article “On the Greatness of King Lear,” from his book King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy. I will assume a basic familiarity with the album. 

Everyone knows that it’s great because of its cohesion, it’s thematic ambition, blah blah blah. What I think will be more fruitful is to do some fairly close readings of the songs, mostly the lyrics but also the music. I may do a few longer posts with more in-depth thematic analysis, but to skim the surface with things like “The tension between the characters is manifested in the relative sloppiness of the performance” is pretty worthless. 

I’ll start with a bit from Oh Comely

The music and medicine you needed for comforting / so make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving / and pluck all your silly strings and bend all your notes for me/ (and) soft silly music is meaningful magical (3:11 – 3:35)

A powerful twenty-five seconds. It is presumably from the point of view of the young observer in King of Carrot Flowers, who makes appearances throughout the album. Equating music and medicine has a precedent; take music as a logos and Gorgias was doing it in antiquity. The interesting bit in that line is that he uses the progressive “comforting” rather than “comfort.” It gives the line a sloppy stream of conscious feel and sense of immediacy. It starts with the past tense “needed,” but the speaker still needs, and will always need, comforting. 

The sexuality aspect of the album is well documented and probably over-discussed, so I won’t go into the next line in too much detail. The important thing here is that he maintains the forward progression from “comforting” to a direct, palpable, presumably comforting action. 

So pluck all your silly strings. Plucking a flower takes virginity, plucking a guitar string can provide a sort of post-coital catharsis. But no one is plucking a flower or a guitar string, the speaker asks someone (a sexual acquaintance? a relative? a close friend?) to pluck all of his / her silly strings. Instead of a word like “silly” cooling down the seriousness of the whole line, it elevates the tension. It’s surrealist imagery that conjures up both youthful and sexual themes. But pluck is also a destructive word. To pluck a silly string is to destroy it. Perhaps the speaker is looking to move on from the obviousness unpleasantness of his childhood situation by destroying (his conception of, his relationship with the concept of, etc.) youth. 

Bend all your notes for me. To bend is to change, notes connote something pure.

Soft silly music is meaningful magical. The speaker is likely in a situation where he cannot blast music from his room. He must listen to it softly or “play” it in his head. Music occupies a special place in the protagonists life; it cannot take on the immediate gravity of his troubled home situation, but it can still be meaningful and magical in its power to just be soft and silly: a quality his parents arguments can never have. 

 

By the way, this is the best video on youtube: