A woman dressed in what appears to be a cross between a (literal) cat suit and a Mexican wrestling outfit fending off creatures that look like something out of Jim Henson’s craziest Dark Crystal imaginings? Check. Large-breasted dogs in American flag jumpsuits, being coaxed in a boxing match by Abraham Lincoln in a Spider-Man suit? Yup, they’ve got that. Oh yeah, and there’s a band playing, too.

All of this and more took place at the Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, Maryland, Saturday night, as the psychedelic rockers from Athens, Georgia, took to the lawn stage for the brewery’s final summer show of 2015, the ensemble’s second time there (they also closed out the 2013 season). Frontman Kevin Barnes led the group — this time a four-piece consisting of Barnes on vocals and guitar, Jojo Glidewell on keyboards, Bob Parins on bass and Clayton Rychlik on drums — through a 17-song set, much of which was drawn from the band’s latest album, Aureate Gloom, and from 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

As is typical for an Of Montreal show, an ensemble of costumed performers — which added a surreal element to the performance — frequently joined the band onstage.

Most of the performance was lit only by images from a projector stationed at the sound booth. This proved to be one of the few flaws of the show; the projections were often dark, making it tough to see what was happening onstage, and they competed with, rather than complimented, the action.

Fellow Athenian indie rockers Mothers and Frederick, Maryland, garage rockers Old Indian opened the show.

All photos by Matt Condon

Old Indian

Mothers

Of Montreal

“Bassem Sabry” opens the new album with a flare of electric guitar worthy of Black Sabbath before launching into… well, disco, of course. Swerves of that sort are to be expected from Of Montreal, but there’s something increasingly rawer and edgier about Barnes’ changes of mind. When he sings, “Every leader is a cellophane punk / If you hear me, say ‘Yeah!,'” the only reasonable response is to sneak past the desire for that to make sense and scream along in solidarity instead. So many bursts of words race by in the first song alone — “cycloptic brooding,” “sedition,” “the mutinous tramp of cold voltage” — that it’s best to relax into the realm of the evocative and let ideas fire as they trigger and fade.

So many ideas permeate Aureate Gloom, no song of which goes without at least a few surprising moves. “Empyrean Abattoir” starts off lithe and tightly coiled, with just a bass line and some suspicious drums, before jump-cutting into raw garage-rock aligned with The Creation on the soundtrack of a Wes Anderson film. The parts of “Monolithic Egress” that aren’t floaty and light are dark and gnarled, with occasional deep-echo effects on the vocals to lend a sense of menace. Guitar lines in “Like Ashoka’s Inferno Of Memory” invoke leads by Led Zeppelin, a heavier allusion than usual for Of Montreal, while other tracks tend toward Sonic Youth or even, in “Chthonian Dirge For Uruk The Other,” thudding punk bands on the Amphetamine Reptile label.

In case you read past without pausing to take it in, it’s worth taking another look at that last song title. Mull it over; let it settle. There is precisely one band that likes rock and funk and disco so much while also opening up the brain space where a title like “Chthonian Dirge For Uruk The Other” might make sense.

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On this installment of World Cafe, we’ll talk with Barnes about how artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen have become guides, and hear performances from onstage at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia.

Copyright 2014 WXPN-FM. To see more, visit http://www.xpn.org/.