Album of the Week: False Priest

Though it came out last summer, I'm just getting around to listening to this most recent album from the Athens, Georgia's Of Montreal. False Priest is funky and features both Solange Knowles and 2010's it-girl Janelle Monae. I'm less into the first track "Do You Strutter" and the single "Coquet Coquette" but I love the rest of the album. In his usual fashion, front man David Barnes creates some pretty hot "Oh hell yeah" moments and his lyrics are as ridiculous as they are unusually honest and vulnerable. These are my favorite lines so far:

From "Girl Named Hello":

If I treated someone else the way I treat myself I'd be in jail.

And, in "Do You Mutilate?" Barnes is surprisingly assertive in his condemnation of religious fanaticism, a far cry from some of his older songs about hipsters, touring and party girls:

Everybody's searching for a cause
A reason to blow themselves up
Could be anything

When will certain people realize
An afterlife is nothing to live for
Nothing to die for, nothing to fight for
If those in this life are not sacred
Then nothing that's a part of it is sacred either

If you think God is more important than your neighbor
You're capable of terrible evil
If you think some prophet's words are more important
Than your brother and your sister
You're ill and you're wrong
You're wrong

In other Of Montreal news, David Barnes recently published an art book called What's Weird? which features, among other things, many colorful images of animal mashups and people with fruit for heads. The band's latest EP, thecontrollersphere, comes out April 26th.

An image from What's Weird?

I'll leave you with "Our Riotous Defects [feat. Janelle Monae]" off of False Priest