On Of Montreal’s previous album, front man Kevin Barnes metaphorically transformed into fictional character Georgie Fruit, a la David Bowie circa alter ego Ziggy Stardust, at the climax of that record’s opus “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” After the epic, id-versus-superego crisis of 2007’s superb Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, we’re left with the megalomaniacal Skeletal Lamping.
The schizoid maneuvers of the voracious, licentious Fruit are captured with wide-eyed alacrity here as Lamping sprawls wildly. Its tracks blend and fold into one another, laced with afro-beat textures and rhythmic jungle grooves, all executed in much the same phantasmagoric manner as The Fiery Furnaces’ Blueberry Boat, to suggest a modern antecedent.
Opener “Nonpareil of Favor” sets the record’s template, beginning as a harpsichord-driven pop song before abruptly metamorphosing into dissonant, unhinged white noise, recalling the frenzied Neu-inspired repetition of the aforementioned “Grotesque Animal”. “Wicked Wisdom” follows, and rather absurdly oozes equal parts sheer hubris and quixotic romanticism (“You’ve got such super wicked style”, Barnes bluntly offers), conferred with a level of swagger suggesting modern gangster rap or R&B. The quasi-soul of “St. Exquisite’s Confessions”, the shimmying, Bowie-esque glam thrust of “And I’ve Seen a Bloody Shadow” and the winsome Beatles circa “Strawberry Fields Forever” piano vignette of “Touched Something’s Hollow” all are somewhat grounded in indie pop conventionality, but they’re no less affecting.
“An Eluardian Instance” finds Barnes waxing plaintively over rococo horns and keyboard slashes, “Do you remember our last summer as independents?” He jarringly segueing into the throbbing disco ebullience of “Gallery Piece”, on which he confesses to a would be lover an obsessive litany of romantic wishes, not the least of which is the lascivious “I want to turn you on, I want to make you come 200 times a day”. The sexual identity crisis at the heart of the record finally comes to a head on “Death Isn’t a Parallel Move”, which begins as a discordant, beat-driven electro number, before drifting into maudlin troubadour territory, with Barnes queasily confessing, “I must diffuse this fractured consciousness/The identity I composed out of terror has become oppressive now”.
It’s never fully reconciled, instead left a miasmatic mess, a rough musical equivalent of David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Like the Lynch film, it demands repeated visits, and is best absorbed as a whole to even begin to crack its initially incomprehensible façade. The clues are largely subconscious, like a Rorschach inkblot. Follow them, and you’re with Barnes on his wildly imaginative journey through gender confusion, subterfuge, lust, and catharsis.
– John Everhart
Of Montreal 
