If you’d picked up of Montreal’s first album, Cherry Peel, back in 1997, and then, having lost touch with them since, had wandered into Koko tonight on the off chance there might be a good show on, you might never realise that you were seeing the same band you’d listened to 13 years earlier.

At the outset, of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes sounded very much like he was going to follow the likes of The Moldy Peaches and Jeffrey Lewis into the quirky anti-folk scene, with strummed acoustic guitars and cutesy pianos backing up a shy and retiring vocal.

Fast forward to 2010, and of Montreal is now an unashamedly full-on robot sex disco, complete with creatures from your most terrifying nightmares and falsetto lyrics you wouldn’t let your granny hear in a million years.

With new album False Priest released only a couple of weeks ago, they kick off here with the lead single from that record, ‘Coquette Coquette’, featuring backing dancing from what looks like a giant red fish on stilts.

The new tracks are packed in side by side like psychedelic sardines in the early part of the set, with the spoken-versed ‘Our Riotous Defects’ hotly followed by ‘Like A Tourist’, and then ‘Enemy Gene’ and ‘Sex Karma’,  two songs which appear as duets on False Priest (with Janelle Monáe and Solange (sister of Beyoncé) Knowles respectively), but which Barnes performs alone here, prancing men in silver spandex morph suits excepting.

The problem is that it takes the detailed production on the album to bring out the nuances that make these tracks separate and distinct, and here in Koko tonight, Barnes’ falsetto, shrieked into a reverb-heavy microphone and with a relentless disco beat behind, all have a tendency to blend into one long track. The material also being brand new, the result is that the crowd are fairly static, more interested in looking at the monster freaks that keep appearing from backstage than in what’s going on musically.

It’s only really later, when offerings from previous albums are given an airing, that recognition gets the crowd moving again. The bassline intro to ‘Gronlandic Edit’ does the trick, and the crowd are whooping and hollering; bizarre when you consider that this particular song, and indeed all of the Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? album that it’s from, document some of the lowest points in Barnes’ life.

But familiarity breeds contentment, at least as far as a gig crowd are concerned, and so the pumping smut finale of ‘For Our Elegant Castle’ (“We can do it softcore if you want/But you should know I take it both ways”) has Koko disco-dancing in every square inch of the venue.

Words: Paddy Burke

Photography: Burak Cingi