It’s time again to see what Of Montreal have cooked up for their listeners. Kevin Barnes, the band’s only permanent member, is relentlessly iconoclastic and hasn’t stuck to one musical idea for long. Last time around, 2022’s Freewave Lucifer was fueled by pandemic isolation. It featured largely electronic sounds and songwriting disinterested in using melodies as hooks. Still, even that was more accessible than some of the epic-length, disjointed pieces Barnes was getting up to in the 2010s. The new album, Lady on the Cusp, finds Barnes again interested in catchy melodies, although some of the musical beds underneath those melodies are typically esoteric.
Maybe the most surprising thing about Lady on the Cusp is Barnes’ style of pastiches. They’ve occasionally dabbled in these waters before, but because it’s only been a song or two here or there throughout a couple dozen records, it still sounds fresh when it does happen. “Rude Girl on Rotation”, is a startlingly accurate slice of 1960s folk-rock. The easygoing, clean electric and acoustic guitar tones, the active but unobtrusive bass playing, and the lightly played but steady drums could easily pass for a band that spent time opening for the Byrds or the Hollies. “Stepping on scorpions / To lose my erection” is a chorus that would never pass muster back in the day.
“I Can Read Smoke” shows a similar commitment to jazz-inflected lounge-pop. It uses jazzy guitar chords, laid-back, brushed drums, and a vocal melody that slides around in half-steps with hints of keyboard and trumpet filling out the sound. The short bridge changes things just enough to remind listeners that this is still Of Montreal, but the song remains a digression into a style Barnes has rarely visited.
The bulk of Lady on the Cusp isn’t nearly as dedicated to specific styles. The opener, “Music Hurts the Head”, has a catchy, singable melody that stays static throughout. Barnes gets fixated on two phrases. The first, “Rock and roll is dead / That’s why it’s cool!” is an excellent line worth repeating. The second, “Intimacy vampires”, is clearly a unique combination of two words that Barnes enjoyed, so it gets revisited many times, often without much context.
While this melody rolls along, the rest of the music keeps changing. It opens with a sparse, electronics-heavy arrangement, gives way to noisy electronic chaos, and makes a stopover in the late 2000s Of Montreal dancey electronics. Then it suddenly jumps into hard rock, complete with distorted guitars and bass, before petering out in multiple layers of vocal harmonies. This musical journey is not unique among latter-day Of Montreal tracks. What’s different is the commitment to a single, easy-to-follow melody. That continues through “2 Depressed 2 Fuck”, which is, musically speaking, a total mess of chaotic sounds and styles. But Barnes has a real, identifiable melody where listeners can anchor their ears.
“Yung Hearts Bleed Free” swirls with funk bass and shimmering 1980s synths and mostly sticks to that groove while repeating the title as a refrain. It also includes the very Of Montreal joke, “I’ve got my prayer beads / And my anal beads / Hope I don’t mix them up.” “Soporific Cell”, on the other hand, uses 1970s piano rock as its inspiration, which makes the song feel like an odd but winning mixture of Ben Folds and Of Montreal. Barnes’ dedication to sticking to that musical feel as a base makes it one of the best Of Montreal tracks in quite a while. Barnes also lets the song jam out on the main groove for the final two-and-a-half minutes. For a group this peripatetic, it’s nice to hear them stick to one thing and do it well for a change.
Since this is Kevin Barnes, this unusually focused version of Of Montreal doesn’t quite last until the end of the record. “PI$$ PI$$” recaptures a lot of the dance-rock style that served as the band’s most popular period, then devolves into slow, messy waves of synths and vocals. Then, Lady on the Cusp‘s final three tracks blur together into a ten-minute stream of consciousness that mostly disregards careful songwriting.
“Sea Mines That Mr. Gone” drifts languidly with little in the way of a set melody and becomes a vocal and saxophone duet for a while. “Poetry Surf” follows, with an opening that sounds more traditional Of Montreal. Yet it doesn’t have a hook or a refrain; Barnes keeps singing for a couple of minutes until it slides into “Genius in the Wind”, the closer. In “Genius”, Barnes does the speak-singing thing where they sound exhausted, while the music keeps shifting. It’s similar to a song from Skeletal Lamping, except instead of blowing through a half-dozen catchy moments in four minutes, here, Of Montreal go through eight to ten different ideas in four minutes without ever approaching a recognizable hook.
For Of Montreal fans who have stuck by Kevin Barnes for this long, there isn’t anything particularly off-putting on this record, and there are a handful of genuine gems. The last time the group attempted a big, catchy album, on 2020’s UR Fun, the planned tour was completely scuttled by COVID. Intentionally or not, Lady on the Cusp comes with several songs that seem tour-ready, so hopefully, this version of the band will get out on the road. As for the record, there’s enough strong material here to keep longtime fans feeling connected while Barnes continues to indulge wherever their musical muse leads.