False Priest

Album: False Priest (2010)
Artist: of Montreal
Label: Polyvinyl Records
Songs: (1) I Feel Ya' Strutter (2) Our Riotous Defects (3) Coquet Coquette (4) Godly Intersex (5) Enemy Gene (6) Hydra Fancies (7) Like a Tourist (8) Sex Karma (9) Girl Named Hello (10) Famine Affair (11) Casualty of You (12) Around the Way (13) You Do Mutilate?

Author

By Matt Zielinski

Publish Date

Nov. 6, 2010

of Montreal’s tenth studio album completes the third installment of an unofficial trilogy highlighting frontman Kevin Barnes's penchant for love, lust, loss, and all the sweat-soaked alleyways in-between.

Enlisting producer Jon Brion (Fiona Apple, Kanye West), False Priest maintains the musical complexity of the band's catalog while enriching it with danceable grooves. Barnes's knack for unconventional melodies and hooks, abstract chord progressions, and mind-blowing moments remain central to his songcraft. Those looking to boogie will have no shortage of options, but the real treat is Barnes's anxious, heartbreaking storytelling, which becomes more engrossing with repeat listens.

This one-way ticket into Barnes's feverish personae feels much like the album art, a small space riddled with chaos, a brain so flush with ideas that they spill and split through every fissure. The opening track, “I Feel Ya Strutter,” lauds the heroine — “girlfriend, I got so lucky with you, so tweaked out and depressed, but now I see that I was blessed” — over a Jackson 5–inspired beat before the quick 180˚ to “Our Riotous Defects,” on which Barnes flips from creeping adoration — “I know it's fucked, but before we got together I even hooked up with one of your cousins just to feel somehow closer to you” — to complete abandonment — “Crazy girl, you're just a crazy girl, I don't know why I even try to understand you."