Of Montreal makes most of its quirkiness

March 07, 2006|Marc Hirsh, Globe Correspondent

It's tricky enough when any one-man band takes to the road with an expanded lineup, but Of Montreal has it tougher than most. Not only was core member Kevin Barnes responsible for almost all the sounds on its last two albums, ''Satanic Panic in the Attic" and the current ''The Sunlandic Twins," the project is idiosyncratic even by the standards of the Elephant 6 collective to which it used to belong alongside the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control. But even as a five-piece, the band's eccentricity remained intact Sunday at the Middle East.

That was clear enough as a glitter-bedecked Barnes took the stage in a wedding dress and a veil asking, ''Will you marry us?" In a way, it was as though a gauntlet had been thrown: at that point, you were either with him or in for a long night.

The singer wasn't entirely kidding around, though. Once he stripped down onstage to jeans and an open shirt (itself later jettisoned), he had the casual swagger and joyful demeanor of an unselfconscious love god.

Barnes's tremulous tenor shout and pseudo-Brit accent when singing bore strong similarities to Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and London Suede's Brett Anderson, while the music most often resembled a supercharged version of the early Magnetic Fields. The resulting noise made New Wave club anthems out of ''Rapture Rapes the Muses," ''The Party's Crashing Us" and the ''Funkytown"-like disco of ''Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games," while ''Oslo in the Summertime" was driven by a drum machine and deep bass, with the other instruments simply adding filigree.

Songs like those had no problem accomplishing the task, notoriously difficult in Boston, of making the audience dance.

Of Montreal's eclecticism sent the band in other directions as well, from the impressively thundering ''The Final Countdown" intro of ''Requiem for O.M.M.2" to a noisy and indulgent percussion/keyboard jam to ''The Repudiated Immortals." The show ended with several audience members making heart shapes above their heads with their hands, and by then Of Montreal had earned the gesture.

Openers the M's played a generous if repetitive 45-minute set of Sloan-style power rock.