With a number one album featured on the CMJ Top 200 chart Sunday, of Montreal had a lot to celebrate when returning home from Europe this past weekend. The band has already revived their U.S. tour, and are headed to Liberty Hall in Lawrence Saturday, Oct. 23 to perform yet another notoriously wild and eccentric live show with tour partner, Janelle Monáe. The band’s full-length album, False Priest, provides listeners with musical influences from Parliament, Prince, Michael Jackson and David Bowie. This album is sure to make you dance your ass off, but what else would you expect from of Montreal?

Jayplay: False Priest is the number one album on the CMJ, College Music Journal, Top 200 Chart ending on Sunday. I bet that was nice to come home to.

Davey Pierce: We found that out when we were in Stockholm actually. It was really exciting.

JP: How does that feel when playing in big college towns, like Lawrence for example?

DP: Lawrence will be our first college town show since coming home to the states. It’s more of a prestige thing. We’re just really excited it happened.

JP: So it kind of solidifies everything you’re doing with making connections with your fans.

DP: Yeah, exactly.

JP: So David Barnes, Kevin Barnes’ brother, is the art director for the band?

DP: Yeah, he comes up with the whole visual scheme of the show and the album covers. David would send Nina a drawing and Nina would draw on top of that and then back and forth.

JP: Along with Janelle Monáe collaborating on the album, Solange Knowles sings in the song “Sex Karma.” How did that collaboration form?

DP: She came out to a show at The Music Hall of Williamsburg in New York and kind of fell in love with the music. Her and Kevin stayed in touch. One thing led to another and now she’s on the track. The first time we met her she was talking about how she saw Chairlift and how they’re one of her favorite bands.Her sister [Beyonce] is obviously one of the biggest stars in the world, and Solange is pretty well known in her own right, but it’s definitely a completely different scene. I don’t think she would even go for the big pop star thing.

JP: The album seems heavily influenced by R&B, heavy, funky beats and groovy, low-end bass lines. Some of the wah-wah guitar parts reminded me of Curtis Mayfield. Was that era of music a big influence on the album?

DP: Oh yeah, absolutely. Seventies R&B funk like Parliament, that was probably the biggest influence on this record. It’s a huge departure from what we were doing beforehand with more synth-oriented, dance pop sort of stuff. On Kevin’s part, it was kind of a huge leap of faith that people would follow it. And they tend to be digging it a lot. I know a lot of people who are into Hissing Fauna, Sunlandic Twins and even Skeletal Lamping. When they hear False Priest they sort of don’t get it at first. They’re expecting another Hissing Fauna, but if we’d done that, half of the fans would have been like, “Oh cool, another Hissing Fauna,” and the other half would be left out because it’d be the same thing over and over again.

JP: Yeah, you can’t stay static within your music scene or you won’t go anywhere.

DP: Exactly, it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

JP: Well you guys are already pretty big risk takers.

DP: Yeah, we do music that we really want to do and not music that people really want us to do. It’s a good and a bad thing. Sometimes that works out really well and other times people won’t pay attention. They’ll hear what you’re doing now and they’re just not into it. But I think this record is a lot more of a mature record and a much more heady, realized album than the last three of four albums have been.

JP: The content of Kevin’s lyrics mention haunting characters that he’s threatened by, especially in the song “Casualty of You.” Do the costumes portray these vice-like characters?

DP: I’m not sure they portray the characters that he had in mind, but our goal for the live show costume concepts was to just listen to the record to make sure it portrayed the feeling of the song. The characters aren’t exactly what Kevin imagined when he was writing the song, but they’re definitely what we imagined when David and I sat down and listened to it.

JP: So it kind of adds more of a context to the song and not as literal?

DP: Exactly, yeah. The False Priest puppets are my favorite. On the front of the album there is a gold fish character with a gas mask on and I built these robot body costumes that people stand behind, but they’re not what Kevin had in mind when was thinking of the False Priest. It’s just what David and I came up with.

JP: Where do you start when brainstorming concepts and ideas for tour garb?

DP: David draws all day on the bus and he’ll hand me a sketch and tell me, “We gotta make this.” And I have no idea what it is but you know, my job is to just make it, so it works out pretty well.

JP: I heard that Kevin’s mother is a seamstress for the band. What kinds of materials do you use to make the costumes?

DP: For this tour I did all the heads out of fiber glass and airbrushed them. For the last couple years we’ve been buying masks and trying to make them work. But they never worked out with what we wanted, so this year we tried fiber glass. I took a month to build the masks out of fiber glass and foam and just horrible, icky things.

JP: Your inter-band project Yip Deceiver did a remix of the single "Coquet Coquette," adding a little more texture and heaviness to the track. Where did you imagine the remix being played when mixing the song?

DP: I have no idea. I don’t even think of the fact that anyone will actually want to play it. People keep asking me to do remixes now and it’s like, I don’t really even do remixes. I kind of just rewrite the songs and make them how I would do it. A lot of people when they do remixes strip everything out and make the track super minimal and I hate that. I layer as many things as I possibly can on them and use different samples. And I don’t actually ever think the end result will be played by anyone. For me, it’s more of the creative process and it doesn’t really matter if people even hear it.

JP: Do you have any fond memories of Lawrence?

DP: We’ve played in Lawrence a couple times and we’ve always had fun there. I love the town. It reminds me a lot of Athens [Georgia], so we kind of immediately feel at home. Last time we were there my moped got ran over by our tour bus.Our merch guy took it in between the bus and the trailer and he forgot to put it back. It got completely ran over. It was a very sad experience because I built it from the ground up. But I salvaged the parts and rebuilt it after the tour. I was riding it yesterday and it’s back up and running, so it’s good.

JP: I’ve seen you play before and the costume and performance aspect of the show is such a great addition to the musical performance. I’m always very appreciative of it.

DP: That’s good. We feel it’s such an important part. If I weren’t in of Montreal, I’d probably be doing the same thing as so many other bands do: standing on stage in a t-shirt and jeans and playing music. It gets kind of old after awhile if every single band out there is doing it. And we really don’t want to be just another band. The performance side is such a huge, huge part of what we do.