You can imagine what Kevin Barnes (center) would wear to a costume party.

I received my comeuppance Saturday night at the Ogden Theatre as Of Montreal played its first Denver show in support of “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?” I had been shouting the Athens, Ga.-based band’s praises for months, encouraging friends to see them live, buy the CD (easily one of the year’s best), send them some gift cards, whatever. “It’s going to be amazing,” I waxed, only to find myself eating those words as the set dragged on Saturday night.

Let me clarify: The set was not bad. At worst it was mediocre, containing enough high points to smooth over the holes created by unrealistic expectations, a shoddy set list, occasionally listless stage presence and seeming obliviousness to the audience. Front man Kevin Barnes told me recently that his band’s current album and tour are as weirdly cathartic as they are part of his job, touching upon the dark, heavy emotional themes that nearly tore him asunder last year, (and that inspired his latest disc).

It was unexpected, then, for Of Montreal to open with the 12-minute “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” That slow-building yawn-inducer is one that Barnes has said he would never play live due to its highly person nature. In fact, the first part of the set felt generally like an encore, the band busting out jammy versions of lesser tunes, and acting like it had already earned the crowd’s attention by only cranking out hits for the last 45 minutes. Unexpected, especially for a band known for its succinct, playful melodies.

Of course, the crowd adored the band, and so they didn’t have to do much earning of its love. Audience members screamed when Barnes pulled one of his pseudo-New Wave dance movies (he looked pretty damn good doing them, too) whether in skin-tight red pants, or in similarly skin-tight gray stretch pants and suspenders. The crowd swayed to the beats. They screamed some more. The sang along and clapped. You get the idea.

Yeah, there were costume changes. There was also a raised stage with a short catwalk, rickety projection screens and a modestly impressive light show. It was pretty ghetto by Pepsi Center standards, but fancy-as-hell for a mid-level indie rock band that plays nearly 200 shows per year. The visuals worked splendidly when married with the songs, as in “Exquisite Confessions,” which found Barnes channeling “Debra”-style Beck with absurd animation (courtesy of Barnes’ brother) flashing on the screen above him. That new track, which supposedly portends a more soulful direction for the notoriously weird band, featured such typical Barnes lines as, “Alicia Keyes has the biggest dick in West Virginia.” Why yes, Kevin, yes she does.

And really, songs like “Suffer for Fashion,” “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” and “Cato as Pun” sounded every bit as dance-inducing on the album, if a bit more ramshackle due to the organic-electric instrumentation. I just couldn’t help but feel deflated as the band ended its normal set with a 25-minute jam (WTF?) that found members constantly switching instruments. My girlfriend and I had wanted to hear “The Party’s Crashing Us,” which apparently the band played during its first encore. We were long gone by then, assuming the jam at the end really was the end, instead of a clever method of driving the non-diehards away. Having seen Of Montreal a couple times before, I suppose the lesson of this show might have been, “Don’t expect anything in particular.”