Album Review

Years from now, when historians zero in on the early 21st century indie-rock hipster movement, Skeletal Lamping will make perfect sense. It is the spot on culmination of an era. A fragmented, underground initiative that was painted into a corner via it’s manic desire to be something different.

For the past four or five years a strange undercurrent has found it’s way into the indie-rock scene: an unrelenting desire to find the next “cool” band. Somewhere along the way the masses began to give up on lifelong favorites, instead choosing the flavor of the month as prescribed by the likes of online blogs, Pitchfork, Spin, etc. The machine is kind at first, but watch out for that second album!

Of course, Of Montreal has bucked this system, basically by constantly re-inventing their own sound. But their sound is only one spoke in the wheel that makes them the perfect ambassadors of the American Apparel underground. Their image is the true icing on the cake. Just take a look at these guys – when did the drama club kids take over rock and roll? The answer is when indie rock shows became more about spectacle than substance, and “the scene” turned into a contest to name-check the latest cool band as opposed to tracking down an obscure seven inch by your lifelong fave. I’m sure I am not the only person who has seen “fashion showcases” creeping their way into club sets over the past couple of years. I know it makes me sound old, but I like a little rock at my rock shows! If I wanted a fashion show or an art showcase I’d subscribe to Vogue. And don’t even get me started on celebrity DJ sets…

So all these mediums: fashion, art, music and drama are colliding head-on now. And how appropriate that an album that could define an era of annoying know-it-all hipsters would be so grounded in disco. Disco, the musical movement that was quite eloquently given a bullet to the cranium on July 12, 1979, when a large box of disco records was rigged with explosives and blown up in front of thousands of baseball fans in Chicago.

But the added touch those disco records lacked that is so predominant on Skeletal Lamping is A.D.D. Whereas early Elephant Six bands (an Athens based recording collective that spawned Of Montreal) often came up with short sonic experimentations that sounded as if they could fit in on psychedelic Beatles albums, the “songs” that Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes comes up with for this album sounds more like a comfy fit for a DJ set by Z-Trip. You get lots of short, hook-filled segments, but that’s it. It’s akin to playing the intro for “Baba O’Reilly” and then completely bailing out of the song when the verses are about to start.

Perhaps the even larger problem is the fact that many of these extremely short fragments don’t leave you wanting more. As in 25 seconds into a 40 second experiment you’re already eager for it to end. Most practitioners of the short song format (The Minutemen and Guided By Voices immediately spring to mind) found success because the short and sweet delivery trimmed the song of fat (excessive solos, bridges etc.) and left the listener hooked and primed for more. Skeletal Lamping, on the other hand, is just a landfill piled high with bad ideas – a funky, electronic, falsetto-vocal-driven stinky pile of poo with all the strange hair, make-up and stage antics thrown on top because that is where all the “over the top” stuff belongs.

But, if the right people say it’s cool…

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