Caught Live: of Montreal @ The Academy, Dublin

Witnessing of Montreal live is pure sensory overload. The stylistic variety and unpredictable twists and turns of the band’s music would be enough to hold your attention as is, but Kevin Barnes and co. aren’t happy to leave things there: they put on a show in every sense of the word, with folks in pig costumes, dancing ninjas, glitter and even a bit of good old-fashioned health-and-safety-baiting (with one of the lycra-clad dancers scaling the side of the stage at one point). I suppose it’s like a Flaming Lips show in a way, but without all the hippy nonsense and with a bit more creativity involved.

Tonight sees their return to Dublin after 2009’s well-received Button Factory show. The Athens, Georgia-based collective are in town to promote new album False Priest, their tenth full-length studio outing. The record’s been given a pretty mixed reception since its release last month, but the new songs featured in tonight’s set seem to bed in very well indeed. Barnes recently spoke of the emphasis on low-end on False Priest, and it’s very noticeable how deep, limber basslines drive many of tonight’s numbers, particularly tunes like ‘Coquet Coquette’ and oldie ‘Gronlandic Edit’. New material like ‘Sex Karma’ and ‘Our Riotous Defects’ sees the band embracing R&B as an influence more than ever before – and although a certain Ms. Monáe might be absent this evening, her collaborators prove they can still groove and swing pretty nicely all on their own.

That being said, there’s something extra-compelling about the band when they’re taking a spikier approach – and most of all when Barnes switches to angry, neurotic mode lyrically. ‘Famine Affair’ (another newie) is a string of bitter admonitions straight out of the Hissing Fauna… songbook, while that same album provides what is still their undoubted trump-card live, ‘She’s A Rejecter’: it’s the point at which all the backing dancers and visual flair make perfect sense, and it sounds even angrier than ever tonight, trampling all over the album version. The R&B influences aren’t long returning, however: the encore features a blistering Michael Jackson medley that rejigs ‘Thriller’, ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ and ‘P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)’. It puts smiles on faces, and the seal on another terrific gig from a gang of genuine mavericks.