Of Montreal rocks El Rey

Of Montreal

Jan. 26, 2007

The El Rey

Of Montreal has certainly gone from strange to stranger. This isn’t a bad thing, especially for those who got to see one of its three sold-out shows in Los Angeles this past

weekend.

The last time I saw Of Montreal live, front man Kevin Barnes started the show by donning a wedding dress and asking Los Angeles to marry him, so I wasn’t sure what to expect

from the band now that it had moved from playing the Ex-Plex to the El Rey. It turns out Barnes’ proposal last year was only a hint of what was to come.

DJ Trevor Risk started things off, but unfortunately didn’t finish them up for over an hour. The mustachioed DJ and his companion, who at intervals lamely sang along to the tracks, made the show seem more like a bar mitzvah than an indie-rock concert.

By the time the second opening act came on I didn’t have the energy to care, which is a shame, because Ariel Pink seemed like an interesting character, and his brand of jammy

prog rock was pretty decent. By the time Pink was halfway through his set we’d lost a whole chunk of souls at stage left to the floor, where they sat until the El Rey security guards made them stand up.

Of Montreal didn’t take the stage until 11:40 p.m., but you can’t stay mad at a band whose front man starts the show being birthed out of an 8-foot-tall plush dinosaur.

Although “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games),” the Of Montreal song that Outback Steakhouse rewrote as a radio jingle, was missing from the set, I suspect its

influence might have been present in the more elaborate stage setup.

Behind the band, a trio of screens showed large folk-art-inspired flower patterns that periodically disintegrated into pixilated squares, and ’70s-era photographs interspersed

with real-time video of the band as it played.

Of Montreal played a mix of new and old material, the latter pulled mostly from “Satanic Panic in the Attic” and “The Sunlandic Twins.”

Barnes used instrumental tracks from “The Sunlandic Twins” for a few ridiculous (in a good way) costume changes.

Standout ensembles included Barnes’ first glam-rock, impossibly tight gold leggings and Dynasty-esque gold jacket, and later, a turtleneck leotard with a cummerbund worn

over fishnets and what appeared to be short red bloomers.

Near the end of the show, Barnes ascended a ladder, climbing up under the long dress that covered it and, once situated at the top, donned a feathered turban and broke into

“Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider.”

Not all of Barnes’ crazy antics were planned.

At one point, he ripped the fishnets on one leg a bit too vigorously, exposing himself to most of Beverly Hills High, which populated the front regions of the El Rey.

Of Montreal closed with “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse,” a song with a chorus reminiscent of a song from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” due to Barnes’ quirky

verbal stylings as he sang “Come on chemica-a-a-a-a-als.” Of Montreal creates a similar scene of absurdity, and Barnes’ outrageous costumes and stage persona aren’t a far cry from a transsexual alien being’s.

E-mail Zehler at [email protected].