This is an amazing album, but a challenging one. The end of the very first track, "Nonpareil Of Favor," is three minutes of painful, cacophonous, mess, meant to represent Kevin Barnes's transition into alter ego "Georgie Fruit." Despite any possible artistic merit, it is so annoying that I actually edited the track end-time in iTunes.

Fortunately, things pick up after the end of the first track. "Lamping," what people call "spotlighting" in my neck of the woods, involves using a spotlight to stun and hunt nocturnal woodland critters; in "Skeletal Lamping" Barnes bravely airs his dirty laundry, spotlighting his innermost thoughts in a pornographic, yet poignant, musical collage. You may find yourself with a verse stuck in your head that is too dirty to sing in public. I catch more of the dense, literary lyrics on each listen. Eventually I revisited of Montreal's previous album, "Hissing Fauna" (which I had previously found underwhelming), to understand more of Kevin Barnes's lyrical "inner cosmology," that "has become too dense to navigate." Since then, my appreciation for that album has increased enormously.

Besides the lyrics--what does this album sound like? There is still a fair amount of synth-pop and disco, similar to recent albums, but "Skeletal Lamping" has much more piano, jangly funk, and falsetto crooning. I prefer the funkier vibe of this album to the synthetic/electronic feel of "Hissing Fauna." Most of the songs here are composed of two or three independent parts, similar to the Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun." Minus a few disjointed transitions, the album feels like a continuous dance mix (including a few slow numbers).

It's hard to pick stand-out tracks--because each track is composed of multiple parts, and because it feels more natural to listen to the album as a whole rather than a collection of singles. Regardless, I'll try to pick my favorite parts.

The first 3.5 minutes of "Wicked Wisdom" are simply beautiful: "when we get together / it's always hot magic." "For Our Elegant Caste" is very upbeat and danceable, with lots of falsetto and vocal harmonies. The gentle piano of "Touched Something's Hollow" sounds like Barnes is channeling Elliott Smith for 60 seconds, and is both sad and beautiful. In the first four minutes of "An Eluardian Instance," a. k. a. "Our Last Summer as Independents" we hear a loving pop song about how Barnes met his wife. "Gallery Piece" is funky and sexy. The second minute of "Women's Studies Victims," is a groovy piece, spoken rather than sung, with a nice organ part somehow reminiscent of the Velvet Underground. The piano-driven first 90 seconds of "And I've Seen a Bloody Shadow" remind me of another White Album song, "Sexy Sadie." The first 2:30 of "Plastis Wafers" is disco-funk done right, while the funky first half of "Beware Our Nubile Miscreants" has one of the funniest lines in recent memory: "He's the kind of guy who would leave you in a K-Hole to go play Halo in the other room."

I don't use that term "masterpiece" lightly, but I think "Skeletal Lamping" qualifies; it is simultaneously dense, wild, profane, silly, and sweet. After the indie backlash following Outback Steakhouse's use of "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games," Kevin Barnes has flaunted his freakishness in order to keep his indie credibility. This hook-filled, deeply personal album is intentionally radio-unfriendly due to its explicit lyrics and unconventional format; but even without a Clear Channel radio single, without actively seeking mainstream success, Barnes is too talented to avoid the spotlight forever.

Let me first say that if you were to put this cd in and play it from start to finish, you will really have no idea where the songs start and where they finish. Just when you think there's an "actual" song, it will completely change tempo and key for the last 50 seconds. Such is the way of the new album, and like it or not, "Georgie Fruit" is in full-effect.

If you weren't a fan of "Hissing Fauna..." then I'm not sure you'd be into this album, but it's still worth a listen.

My one major grip with the record is the opener. It starts out fine and dandy for 2:05 seconds, but then it turns into a mess of dissonant chords and pretty much just awful noise... which would be tolerable for about 15 seconds, but instead it continues and intensifies for a FULL THREE MINUTES! If anything, that should be saved for the last song on the disc, but instead they make a terrible decision to start of the album that way. If I wasn't already an Of Montreal fan, I would've shut off the album immediately and probably wouldn't go back, which is unfortunate as I would've missed a lot.

While the songs are scatterbrained, there are plenty of psych-pop hooks and overdubbed vocals sprinkled throughout to keep you entertained. The song Wicked Wisdom starts out nice and funky, and doesn't disappoint through all the in-song changes. Even when the track slows down, the dynamic shift is quite memorable.

My favorite track is "An Eluardian Instance", as I am a big fan of the 'Satanic Panic...' and 'Sunlandic Twins...' albums, and this is the closest they come to that sound on this album. Great track.

Other highlight tracks are "Gallery Piece", with its poppy yet daring vocal melody and "St. Exquisite's Confessions", which features some great lyrics against a nice soft and easy tempo.

There are a few other great tracks here besides what I mentioned, so it's definitely worth a buy!

the initial listen is a bit of a feeler, maybe even a bit of "what is all this mess?"

the second listen, you are still not quite sure.

somewhere in the 3-5th listenings, it clicks.

this album is genius and magnificent. complex and broad in stature, it deserves a few listens before giving up on it, like every great album.

This is perhaps the best Of Montreal album to date. Fusing the pop-prowess of "Hissing Fauna..." with the schizophrenic-pastiche songwriting of "Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies..." and "The Bedside Drama," it truly is a perfect postmodern pop album. People have slammed this album pretty hard for being self-indulgent and all over the place sonically, but it is truly one of the most engaging albums of the year. It has the soul of Marvin Gaye, the funk of Prince, the glamour and pop sensibilities of David Bowie and the perfect mixture of frank sexuality and sardonic wit.

Best Pop Album of 2008

Earlier this year, Of Montreal frontman and main creative force Kevin Barnes stated in an interview that Skeletal Lamping would be composed of "hundreds of short segments ranging from thirty to fifty seconds in length" and "would deviate from traditional pop song structures." While Lamping definitely doesn't have a hundred-plus track list, it's fifteen titled "songs" deviate so far from standard pop conventions that it's almost silly to analyze the album in the context of each tune, as each consists of a amalgam of radically different sounds and ideas. And while this is an expected hallmark of Barnes, a ridiculously talented musician fairly bursting with new and innovative ideas, Skeletal Lamping can't help but collapse under the weight of it's own pretensions.

Whereas last year's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? detailed love, break-ups, and Barnes' fictional and incredibly odd "transformation" into his musical alter ego Georgie Fruit (a black former funk musician in his late 40s whose been through multiple sex changes and a couple stays in prison), Lamping concerns itself with Fruit, for the most part, through its entirety. Barnes has never been one for subtlety or, uh, normalcy, and so for much of Lamping we get lyrics like "I want you to be my pleasure puss / I want to know what it's like to be inside you" on the tiresomely long "Plastis Wafers" and other typically Barnesian sentiments such as "I'm so sick of sucking the dick of this cruel, cruel city / I've forgotten what it takes to please a woman" on "St. Exquisite's Confessions." While this may be exactly what a forty-year-old transsexual might sing about, the concept is only entertaining for a short while before turning the corner from novelty to absurdity.

But sexually charged, metaphor-laden lyrics and Barnes' unique vocal stylings are par for the course with Of Montreal. Instead, it's the frustrating unevenness and ADD musical twitches that continually stunt Lamping's momentum and bring the record back down to earth and (for Of Montreal, at least) mediocrity. Barnes switches from theme to theme, from instrument to instrument, from piano balladry to funky guitar grooves to bombastic synths to techno-dance madness. Barnes has never been all over the place more than he is on Skeletal Lamping, and it's a testament to his unbridled creativity as well as his inability to edit well.

At times (like on the anthemic "An Eluardian Instance" or the skittering synth-pop of "For Our Elegant Caste") you can't believe what you're hearing: the future of indie pop as seen through the lenses of a psychedelic, bisexual madman with a penchant for multi-tracked harmonies. At other times, however, you just want to slap Barnes for ruining a good thing by putting too much on at once (the long, dreary "Plastis Wafers" and the schizophrenic opener "Nonpareil of Favor" come to mind). Meticulously put together ear candy will, at times and for no obvious reason, suddenly take a 180-degree shift into a discordant, high-pitched jangle that highlights the album's true overarching theme: inconsistency.

Of Montreal's latest, then, fails because it lacks the very thing that made their earlier works such satisfying works of power pop: a balance between boundary-pushing experimentalism and a focus on crafting melodic tracks that connect to the listener. Skeletal Lamping is surely challenging, and at some parts Barnes' has created some of 2008's most transcendent moments, but as a whole the album stumbles along a myriad of half-baked ideas with the occasional "a-ha!" moment interlaced frustratingly and sporadically throughout.