Logic of Excess.(Kevin Barnes, singer of the rock band Of Montreal; Skeletal Lamping)(Critical essay)

Kevin Barnes, of Of Montreal, has written, performed, and recorded many of its songs alone, but these days he is joined onstage by an increasing number of unpantsed musicians and painted performers. Since the band formed, eleven years ago, in Athens, Georgia, Barnes has been committed to the pleasures and the logic of excess. Why go for the usual themes when you can write a song called "Dustin Hoffman's Wife Calls in Detective to Dust for Porcelain Particles on Dustin Hoffman's Tongue" (from a 2001 release with "Dustin Hoffman" in every title) or "There Is Nothing Wrong with Hating Rock Critics"? If 2008 wasn't a big year for semiotics or for what Barnes calls "the depths of this phallocentric tyranny," it did no apparent harm to Of Montreal--its latest album, "Skeletal Lamping," is moving the band closer to the center of whatever the indie-rock conversation is now.

Barnes's bag of tricks is deep; David Bowie's bedazzled seventies rock is just as relevant as literary nods, disco highs are as appealing as melodic intricacy, and pleasure seems to drive every one of Barnes's impatient, rococo arrangements. "Skeletal Lamping," the group's ninth and best album, isn't just the most danceable; disco punches up the hedonism in Barnes's songwriting, and the steady 4/4 thump helps keep the fidgety songs from splintering.

In the nineties and early aughts, Barnes was roughly in step with his friends in a musical collective called Elephant 6. Along with bands like Elf Power, Of Montreal drew from several decades of melodic guitar pop, especially the English band XTC, and made rackety, exuberant rock albums. Barnes has a high, thin voice that often mimics a falsetto even when he's not singing falsetto. He could slip seamlessly into the chorus of a Zombies or a Beach Boys record. Pop's secular boys' choir is not so removed from the castrato voices of canonical disco acts like the Bee Gees and Sylvester, and Barnes began flirting with derivations of disco in 2005, on the album "The Sunlandic Twins," with songs like "I Was Never Young" (an uncommonly plain phrase for him) and "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" (much more like it). Of Montreal came closer to being a de-jure dance band on 2007's celebrated "Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?"

"Skeletal Lamping" continues in this vein, and although it is not always formally dance music, it dances, and rarely leaves the old-fashioned joys of song form behind. Barnes could never settle for dance music's heartbeat--long stretches of repetition--because his compositions flicker too rapidly. So it is perhaps more helpful to think of Of Montreal as one big dance d.j. rather than as representative of any genre of dance music itself. The songs on "Skeletal Lamping" are like mini mix tapes; strung together, it's just a whole lot of mixing.

If you want to know exactly how A.D.D. a Barnes song can get, go to the seven-minute "Plastis Wafers," which could be a self-contained primer on "Skeletal Lamping." The song has four main sections, and touches on many of the sounds and ideas that Barnes returns to: sexuality, books, disco, progressive seventies rock, androgynous vocals, the shortest distance between two styles, and the entanglement of clear language and ambiguous feelings. Early in the song's light-footed opening, which might be an Italian disco track from 1981, Barnes sings, "I confess to really being quite charmed by your feminine effects, you're the only one with whom I would role play Oedipus Rex." For Barnes, reading and music and sex all seem to be connected to the same central pleasure node. Barnes knows he's dealing with heady material, which might be why "Skeletal ...