A lovely concert review from Paste Magazine’s online blog – excerpt:
So all that was a fairly good Of Montreal show. But the final two songs are what everyone will remember. They performed the drone-y synth instrumental “October Is Eternal,” at which point Barnes left the stage and let everyone else carry the groove. He was conspicuously absent as festival crew taped a large sheet of plastic to the stage behind his microphone, a foreboding and puzzling action. The song transitioned into “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,” which, even on Hissing Fauna…, lasts almost a full 12 minutes. Suddenly, a huge open coffin, covered in flowers and other woodsy detritus, appeared, being rolled onto the stage by the crew and the costumed actors. It was filled with a viscous white substance, two heavily-coated hands gripping its edges. They propped the case upright in front of the microphone, and out stepped Kevin Barnes, completely coated in shaving cream—a zombie, a mummy in personal hygiene products. “At least I author my own disaster,” he intoned, his cohorts popping balloons full of glitter on his head. The song reached its climax, and he began jerking and shimmying in his jiggling shaving cream a little more ecstatically; then with a sudden motion, he dropped to the ground. One moment he was there, the next he was barely visible, limbs flashing intermittently into sight as he rolled frantically around. He then leapt off the stage and into the photo pit, rubbing against the crowd, wailing “Let’s tear this shit apart!” and covering everyone in shaving cream.
When Barnes returned to his place, the set concluded and they left the stage triumphant, tossing copies of their EP Icons, Abstract Thee into the stunned, sated, and shaving-creamed crowd.
