The Mod Club is decorated as its name would lead you to expect - the walls are festooned with paintings of girls with Union Jack earrings and Lambretta scooters. Also adding to the decor are a few large, round video screens (which I saw put to excellent use in January at the Meligrove Band's video release party), and some pretty crazy lighting (which my photographer friends always complain about). Other than that, we have your standard Toronto music venue: a relatively small room featuring a bar, a "licensed" area where all of the less-excited, stand-around-and-watch types like to sit, and a balcony for drunk guys to stagger around somewhat dangerously on (as happened during Of Montreal's encore that night).
Opening were Toronto's Pyramid Culture, an act so gleefully bizarre they really wouldn't be at home opening for anyone but Of Montreal. Imagine, if you will: four appreciably cute girls in polo-shirtdresses and matching fishnets (one in red, one in orange, one in green, and one in purple), chanting into their microphones like robotic Luna Lovegoods commentating a rock-and-roll Quidditch match. With choreographed hand actions, over prerecorded beats.
Artistic value be damned (it should be noted that the Pyramid Culture ladies recently shared the stage with 'hey, let's whack things together and call it music' visionaries Dollarama at CMW's "Bad Band Night"), there isn't much that beats cheesy techno songs about face transplants and "Parasitic Fetal Twin"s. Their energetically daffy stage personas (the girl in purple alone was enthusiastic enough to power the entire band), the preternatural cuteness of the girl in orange, and some slightly gratuitous - ahem - "fanservice" from Red throughout the show made their set weirdly riveting. Fellow triangular-structure championers (and pop absurdists) Devo would have been proud. Remember, kids: "Your ancestors died for a pyramid culture! Everyone dies for a pyramid culture!"
"We're here to make love to you tonight. But first, you have to marry us!" declared Kevin Barnes from inside a monstrous white wedding dress. "Will you marry us, Toronto?"
The mob accepted, by way of a dollar-store ring slipped around the finger of a front-line audience member (and enthusiastic cheers from everyone else). And so began Toronto's odyssey into the poppy dreamscapes and entropic tundras of Georgia's Of Montreal. Once the viciously danceable keyboard line of "Rapture Rapes The Muses" tore through the cheers, it was clear: not only are they happiest damn band recording music today, but they're as happy - or happier - in concert. Listening to the band's twistedly saccharine love songs ("Let's Do Everything For The First Time Forever", say, or "A Dreamy Day Daydreaming Of You") is akin to mainlining an I.V. drip of battery acid-flavored Kool-Aid, and rumour has it that "Disconnect The Dots" led the United States' military forces to research the usage of handclaps and organ riffs as biological warfare (upon exposure, frantic dancing is inevitable and uncontrollable).
Live, however, the effect is magnified several times over by seeing all five Of Montrealers superbly glammed out for the occasion. Guitarist Brian Poole was wearing a rather mod striped shirt (an appropriate match for the venue) and a slick of black eyeliner that was running with sweat by the middle of "Lysergic Bliss"; Matt Dawson opted to hang out in the back with his bass, but remained very much visible to the crowd due to his impressively tall fur hat. Barnes, meanwhile, undertook three different costume changes over the course of the evening (my favourite was probably the see-through, orange raincoat).
Their choice of attire nicely complemented the band's onstage antics, which carry into a live setting the weird sort of whimsy that surrounds the band's music. "In the future, there will be a great war. It may not be tomorrow, but it will probably be the day after tomorrow," said Barnes, by way of introducing "Chrissie Kiss The Corpse" (arguably the best song ever written about playing pranks on the body of an elderly woman). "And it will be fought by the insects and the cats...versus the reptiles and the apes." This, of course, led to the crowd forming rival factions - the "Insects! And Cats!" cheers were considerably louder than those coming from the "Reptiles! And! Apes!" supporters. "No, no, no," interrupted keyboardist Dottie Alexander (who gave off an air of "sexy drama teacher", as interpreted by my friend Neill). "It's clearly Reptiles and Apes. You have fangs and intelligence versus wings and...cat piss. You guys are nuts."
But when OM (who were named in honour of a Canadian woman who once broke Barnes' heart) weren't busy inventing zoological doomsday scenarios, or busting out into sudden covers of Europe's "The Final Countdown", they were inciting their own brand of mass panic. Most of the setlist stuck to selections from their last two albums,Satanic Panic In The Attic and The Sunlandic Twins, which saw the band abandoning their previous Beach Boys-influenced, acoustic folk for electrified twee-funk. Had they played their older material, the show would have been charming but admittedly subdued, but the newer stuff - notably, "My British Tour Diary", "Disconnect The Dots", and "The Party's Crashing Us" - ensured mass dancing and gleeful grins throughout the room.
Yes, Of Montreal are musical mad scientists, having managed to distill Kinks and Zombies-era pop into its purest, syrupiest form. But if you haven't seen Kevin Barnes do a fey, hip-swishing dance with his guitar in a gold lame Elvis shirt, not only do you remain ignorant to the band's true power, but you simply haven't lived.
-Natalia Manzocco
