Of Montreal, "Gallery Piece"

The second of my not-really-new new acquisitions this past weekend was Of Montreal's Skeletal Lamping. Listened to it at the gym, so I missed quite a bit of Kevin Barnes's overnuanced oversharing in the lyrics. For its purposes of the moment, it was a sexy disco record.

One song did, however, thematically jump out at me: "Gallery Piece," a list of demands ranging from the suggestive to the unsettling, the physical to the psychological, all in the name of possessing the desired other, body and mind and soul but mostly body. ("I wanna be your what's happening" the most endearing of the lot, "I wanna be your only friend" the most disturbed; and that they're back-to-back lines is kind of a problem.) In Barnes's unhinged passion he is not unlike Levi Stubbs in "Bernadette," in whose name love is the drug and he needs to score. That Barnes and Stubbs couldn't be more dissimilar in every other measure only underscores how universal the pains and problems of love are, including the confusing of a beloved with a possession to be desired and ultimately owned.