of Montreal, Yip Deceiver

It’s impossible to predict what of Montreal is going to do next. Kevin Barnes’s long-running pop band has cycled through a number of guises over the years—psychedelia and vaudeville in its early Elephant 6 years, surreal seventies-indebted glitter pop in the early aughts, heavy and baroque psych-rock around the turn of the decade (see: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?), glammy sex-funk in 2008 with Skeletal Lamping, roots-rock posturing on 2013’s Lousy with Sylvanbriar, New York punk (Aureate Gloom), and, finally, eighties dance pop, with last year’s White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood. Where will Barnes lead his band of merrymakers tonight? Who knows. of Montreal keeps you guessing, and that commitment to following Barnes’s muse down whatever rabbit hole—as much as the sonic and conceptual ingenuity it exerts in doing so—is what makes the band consistently alluring. Its maximalism is mesmerizing, and it sets its variegated vernaculars and timbres in the service of unadulterated self-expression.