Originally part of the Elephant 6 collective, Of Montreal have been around for many years and now, ten albums in, they still maintain a lot of Elephant 6”™s group style with their penchant for musical experimentation and mixing of styles.
False Priest is essentially a very odd album. Even without the heavy psychedelic and funk influences that are obvious on many of the tracks, the album can easily be described as weird, ostentatious and at times hard to listen to.
Recent Of Montreal albums seemed to have themes and concepts that were bubbling to the surface, whereas False Priest would appear to be more of a bizarre mishmash of thoughts and ideas. Because of this, the album, at times, lacks inspiration and is too unconventional for its own good. It”™s like lead singer and songwriter Kevin Barnes, and his transsexual alter-ego Georgie Fruit, are being off the wall for the sake of being off the wall. There is a heavy funk influence on this album, and that genre is known for its space imagery, but lyrics like ”˜Unicorns eating baby meat, There”™s dragon rape if you want one”™ on ‘Like A Tourist’ are a bit over the top.