Of Montreal: "Coquet Coquette"

The Of Montreal brand name has always meant a certain dosage of sugar, but whether it’s pure Pixy Stix or Smirnoff Ice spiked with ecstacy depends on how old Kevin Barnes was while making the album. “Coquet Coquette” suggests that with the odd success of his last two albums—there’s a market for tinny, melodically and verbally overstuffed sex jams?—Barnes’s ambition is now purely market-share oriented. There’s a hint of Splenda for the first time, and for an artist whose career is built around raw organic sweeteners, it tastes sort of shitty.

As such, the song is a weird validation of the most anachronistic quirks Barnes has acquired over the years, like his shameless TMI quotient or laptop-sized sonic pallette. Jon Brion’s giant drumset is like a cocky friend sucking all the air out of the room, and Barnes’s lyrics, which combine the paranoid therapy lingo of his later albums with the breezy sketchiness of his earlier ones, drift away in the undertow. “Make The Bus,” his Janelle Monae collaboration from earlier this year, has similar problems with focus, but at least it was ballsy enough to lay some unapologetically carnival muzak sound quality and insular bullshit lyrics on a major label album executive produced by the erstwhile P. Diddy. Here, the bass loses its Barnesian bounce; the guitars and synth merely plod through dutifully. While a typical Of Montreal song sounds breathless, for better or worse, “Coquet Coquette” sounds tired, overpracticed. Even the punchlines—“I don’t want to catch you with another guy’s face under your eyelids / You give me emotional artifacts that can find no purchase”—sound more like exhalations than revelations.

So what is False Priest going to be? Barnes, for once, sounds old, like he’s ready to skip past Berlin on his Bowie trip, straight to mid-eighties cash-in time. He’s definitely earned the right to head out to pasture, and if the synth/timpani symphony at the end of “Coquette” is any indication, it’d be a hell of a lot more interesting than most indie dad-rock. But love him or hate him, the ever-widening ambition of the Of Montreal act has been one of the most reliable sideshows in indie rock, with more invention coming out daily from one oversexed family than most bands generate in a career. The slapdash production, as if Barnes could barely keep up with the music in his head, was part of what let even the most half-baked ideas seem exciting and raw. If anything, he seemed destined to become a Prince, kicking it into ever-higher gear, using brute force to stay relevant. Instead, “Coquet Coquette” is more late-period Kinks, nothing but a vaguely familiar voice and sensibility, going through the motions to keep a lifestyle afloat. I’d want to hobnob with Solange too. It just sucks to get slipped the Diet Montreal after relying on the real stuff for so long.