OF MONTREAL Indie dance music? It's what's happening for music fans

More fans are tuning in to the new wave, and that's fine with Of Montreal.
By JOHN BENSON
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
Sound the alarms, wake up Dick Clark and turn on the strobe light -- indie rock fans are dancing again. No, not moshing, but actual dancing, with their hips swaying, heads bobbing and fingers snapping.
Leading the charge is Athens, Ga., band Of Montreal, which is the vision of Mentor native Kevin Barnes, who moved away from northeast Ohio when he was 12 years old.
"I think that there seems to be a good movement right now of intelligent, dance-y type of music that is coming out from the underground that has a larger following," said Barnes, calling from outside Baltimore. "It's not really underground. The new term is 'mainstream underground.' You're still underground because you're not being pushed by MTV or the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, but you can still reach a really large audience because there are more people turned on to this kind of music now."
More and more music fans are discovering this new wave of indie pop music, which includes critically acclaimed artists such as The Shins, the New Pornographers, The Decemberists and more.
Starting out
It's been a long time coming for Barnes, who to this day credits an uncle by marriage who inspired him as a kid to play guitar. Soon, the youngster was mastering the Rolling Stones' early catalog, one Jagger/Richards song at a time.
Barnes' attempt to find his own musical identity began in 1994 when he moved back to northeast Ohio after graduating from high school in Florida. He hoped to form a band but failed to find any band mates, so after playing a few coffee house open mic nights, he returned to the Sunshine State before eventually landing in R.E.M.'s hometown.
Soon thereafter, Barnes formed a group, naming it after an ex-girlfriend's native city. Little did he know at the time, having Montreal as part of a band name in 2005 would be tantamount to calling a band Of Seattle in 1991.
"Yeah, a lot of people lump us in with that scene," Barnes said. "It's cool because for the longest time you didn't really hear that much out of Canada and now they have this kind of explosion of great bands. And it's like some fans have no knowledge of where we're from or our history and think we're part of the Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene [movement]."
Moving forward
Musically, Of Montreal's last two studio albums -- 2004's "Satanic Panic in the Attack" and 2005's "The Sunlandic Twins" -- are leaps and bounds from its earlier catalog, which can be characterized as decidedly esoteric and experimental. Barnes has finally come into his own as a singer-songwriter, combining surreal lyrics and shiny disco beats with overflowing funk basslines to create mature 21st-Century indie pop.
& quot;I think it's more of just wanting to do something different," Barnes said. "I don't really feel like I was necessarily more immature five years ago. At that time, I had no sense of self-editing. When we were recording, we'd just overdub for hours and hours, and layer and layer and layer. I think now we're doing a little bit less of that and giving the songs a little bit more space."
Who knew that doing less and creating more space would result in happy feet among young indie rockers?
"Exactly, it's no small feat," said Barnes. His band plays Cleveland on Wednesday at the Beachland Ballroom and Pittsburgh on Thursday at The Andy Warhol Museum. "So far, the response has been amazing. People are just dancing like crazy. So, if you want to have fun and want to see other sexy people having fun, it's the place to be."