The inner tensions so ever-present on last year's "Hissing Fauna, Are You Destroyer?"--representing the aggravated distance between Of Montreal [ tickets ] ringleader Kevin Barnes and the Kevin Barnes who just wanted to stop being Kevin Barnes for awhile--have spilled over full force on "Skeletal Lamping," with Barnes allowing black transsexual alter-ego Georgie Fruit (sort of a lab mix-up involving Ziggy Stardust and Dennis Rodman) to run the whole show.

The problem here is that the giving-in to compulsion, in this case anyway, doesn't necessarily lead to better art. Barnes, in fact, might be one of those people who is too interesting for his own good:

"The character's name is Georgie Fruit, and he's in his late forties, a black man who has been through multiple sex changes," Barnes told an interviewer last year. "He's been a man and a woman, and then back to a man. He's been to prison a couple of times." He went on to add that Georgie had once been in a band "like the Ohio Players."

"I'm just a black she-male / and I don't know what you people are all about / chalky people," Barnes sings on the deep-into-the-groovy "Wicked Wisdom." While inside the singer's head, a sweaty but beautiful audience full of indie kids very likely throws their hands up in the air like they just don't care, but outward effect is muted and fretful, like an unpopular kid hoping somebody--anybody--shows up at his birthday party.

The sharp musical relief that defined and ruled the good times on "Hissing Fauna" seems rounded down and muddled here, with most tracks powered Casio-style by the electronic skittering of tiny robots across the studio floor. "For Our Elegant Caste" and "Gallery Piece" ("I wanna crash your car / I wanna scratch your cheeks / I wanna make you sick") unroll in similar fashion, never really going anywhere but looking really good marching in place.

"Touched Something's Hollow" barely acknowledges a sense of music at all, featuring just a distant piano and the apparent sound of Barnes floating down a river tossing regrets off the back of a log. "Women's Studies Victims" plays to Of Montreal's strengths, Queen-like harmonies combined with indie attitude, but the mix is so grimy that the song collapses under its own weight; you'll nod your head to it when it comes up in party shuffle on your iPod, but you won't go seek it out on its own; it's barely there.

Most of the musical problem areas here (and the biggest one, let's be frank, is that Barnes' always-exhausting genre-skipping has never been more relentless) could have been overlooked in the presence of compelling storytelling to wrap the head around instead, but tight wordsmithing has simply never been Barnes' stock in trade; gems like "Lover-face / I want to make you ejaculate until it's no longer fun" and "Clarify my empty elephant of some beautiful death" aren't as horrible on record as they read on paper, but they aren't going to win any blue ribbons at the county fair.

Barnes certainly hasn't lost his genius for compelling, oddball hooks, and on highlights like "And I've Seen a Bloody Shadow" and the seven minute-plus "Plastis Wafer" the basic groove in effect is irreducible, but the net effect of chasing "Skeletal Lamping" around for just under and hour (while it frantically surveys all musical landscapes on the horizon and skitters along just out of arm's reach at all times) is an hour one might wish they had spent doing something much simpler, like solving a Rubik's Cube.