False Priest by of Montreal

An inventive, richly melodic and generally superb-sounding record that finally permits the listener to sit back and enjoy Barnes' black Seventies influences, yet falling a little short of its two predecessors by dint of lacking their cohesion and emotional weight.

The most enticing aspects of the band's R&B are the places where it deviates from the recipe: its acidic, self-loathing undercurrent, its sugar-high unpredictability.

Of Montreal's 2007 album, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, is one of the best 'breakdown' albums ever. In a reversal of most artistic endeavours, the more self-indulgent and navel-gazing singer-songwriter Kevin Barnes' writing became, the more inclusive and enjoyable the album proved as a listening experience. The follow-up, 2008's Skeletal Lamping, took the funky rhythms and sex-fixated lyrics of Hissing Fauna and screwed them up into a knotty, continuous song cycle. It proved mostly successful, although even Skeletal Lamping's most avid fans are unlikely to listen to it regularly.

False Priest is certainly a notable step-up from Skeletal Lamping, the release where Barnes lost me as a fan. False Priest doesn’t do enough to reel folks like me back into the hype machine, mainly because the lyrics are simply too dense and abstract to enjoy in this setting.