Of Montreal: Welcome to Normal Town

Photographed for SPIN by Michael Schmelling

"Over here we're building leaf-blower guns," says Nick Gould, who started designing sets and props for Of Montreal as a recovering film-school student and dates keyboardist Alexander. Components of a dazzling stage set stack up high against a wall, with luminescent risers and a catwalk suspended in between. In concert they flash in stroboscopic patterns like something from Ziggy Stardust's yard sale. In storage they're just a bunch of plywood contraptions cobbled together and crammed with standard-issue 60-watt bulbs. "Your output is going to be exponentially more creative when you make it up as you go," says Gould.

Of Montreal's growing stature -- 2006's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? sold an indie-respectable 108,000 copies worldwide -- owes a lot to the ad hoc spectacles they stage, with little budget but lots of ingenuity. When they performed "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" on Late Night With Conan O'Brien last year, Of Montreal had so many people doing so many different things on set -- sword fighting, stumbling around in a ten-foot space-god suit -- that union rules required them to be billed as a "performance group" rather than just a band.

Such shoestring theatricality has made them heroes to a new breed of like-minded bands. "Kevin is constantly pushing the boundaries of pop, which is inspirational to slackers like us," says Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT. "He's making the Black Albums and Station to Stations of today."

This outsize ambition has been funded in part by a handful of commercial deals, including a jingle for a certain Australian-themed steak-house franchise that has been the source of much debate in indie circles. "It's all slightly embarrassing, a skeleton in the closet," Barnes says. "But we put a lot of money into the shows that we might not see again. If you want to make a living making music these days, you have to have other sources of income."

"We're always up for an incredulous moment," says guitarist Bryan Poole, who joined up with Barnes more than a decade ago. Back then, Barnes was a shy, awkward twentysomething from Florida with an ear for forgotten '60s pop and a belief that indie rock could be more than glum guys in plaid shirts. Poole remembers him confessing to not having any friends until he was ten or 11, so "he had to create his own world and all these things to entertain himself."

Barnes wasn't alone in Athens, though. When he first moved there, he shared a house with Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel and Will Hart and Bill Doss from Olivia Tremor Control -- each a prime mover in the experimental psychedelic confab known as the Elephant 6 Recording Company. "That was just about making music for yourself and your friends," Barnes remembers. "The scene didn't exist that we wanted, so we just had to make it."

Read the entire Of Montreal story in the October 2008 issue of SPIN, on newsstands now.