Summerfest hits ground running with of Montreal

By Nathan Divers

Published June 2, 2010

Crazy costumes, trippy cartoons, brain-eating pigs, sword fights with phantom-like figures, great music. If you’ve never seen of Montreal in concert, this is what you’re missing.

The Atlanta-based indie-pop five-piece kicked off this year’s 9th Street Summerfest with a free show outside The Blue Note on May 26, joining the ranks of past headliners such as Death Cab for Cutie, Ben Folds, Willie Nelson and Wilco.

“The biggest difference between where we are now and where we were when we started is the level of the bands that are playing,” said Peter McDevitt, The Blue Note’s talent buyer.

Of Montreal released its first full-length record, Cherry Peel, in 1997 and has continued to put out records on an almost yearly basis.

For the past 13 years, the band has been touring heavily and turning out records that consistently receive critical acclaim, most notably 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? and 2008’s Skeletal Lamping, which made several year-end best-of lists, including those of Rolling Stone and Paste Magazine.

Though the band has been making music for more than a decade, its Summerfest performance consisted of tracks primarily from Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping, though the band did play some older songs and gave the audience a preview of what its upcoming release, False Priest, may sound like.

Of Montreal’s set started off with some sound problems, though the band and the sound engineers managed to work out most of the kinks after a few songs.

“Overall, I loved the show, even though the sound was pretty awful at first,” junior Sky Robinson said.

But anything the band lacked in sound, they more than made up for with on-stage visuals.

A pair of projector screens were placed behind the musicians and offered a cinematic aspect to the performance. The two screens displayed everything from cartoons that looked like Saturday morning kids shows on acid to close-ups of the band to silent movie-style quotes, which were accompanied by a few “actors” who portrayed various scenes, such as a family dinner that ended with smashing dishes and a slap fight between Santa Clause and one of his elves.

With such an intense live show, of Montreal seems like the ideal band to be the closing act for any summer festival. But Summerfest is far from over.

As the name implies, the festival will continue throughout the rest of the summer, featuring more free shows. Los Lonely Boys will be playing at the festival June 30, with La Movida; alt-country pioneers Old 97’s will take the stage July 28, with The David Wax Museum; and Carolina Chocolate Drops will perform August 25, with Big Smith and The Hatrick. According to McDevitt, a yet-unannounced ticketed show is also in the works for the festival.

“There are a lot of cool things about Summerfest,” McDevitt said. “The majority of the events are free and bring people to the downtown area on a day where it might be slow otherwise. It’s good for the community.”