I adored Black Moth Super Rainbow‘s last album, Dandelion Gum, but when I started reading post-release interviews I started to get a little weary.
BMSR frontman Tobacco spends most of the time affirming and re-affirming that Black Moth Super Rainbow is “me,” or talking about how he hopes to someday quit music and move on to visual art, or trying to “get past” the folklore of Dandelion Gum.
It just seems to me that Tobacco has received a lot (a LOT) of attention lately; maybe too much (does Wavves ring a bell?).
Peep this one, for example. Or this one; do you see a pattern emerging? [This interview is actually fucking awesome, totally insightful writing with MP3s of old BMSR and even older projects from Tobacco and friends.)
Then Tobacco released his solo joint, Fucked Up Friends, on Anticon and I got a little worried because it sounded exactly like Dandelion Gum with maybe a rapper or two thrown in. Then the Drippers EP came out with more of the same and I flat-out got frantic.
Now that I’m finally hearing Eating Us, Black Moth Super Rainbow’s fourth album, I’m forced to take my enthusiasm down a notch, just as I had feared. This doesn’t sound like the confident composer that opened Dandelion Gum with day-glo-pink melodies, beats and effects so cherry you could almost pick them off.
As an album opener, “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Shine” allows a portal into a good hunk of Eating Us: It’s catchy, sure, but doesn’t expand on — or live up to — the standard Tobacco set with DG, the “Zodiac Girls” single or Fucked Up Friends.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of fun to be had, however. “Dark Bubbles,” a shameless carbon copy of past BMSR memos with its patented synth layers and vocoders, will definitely bring a little sunshine into the office when it makes its rounds. “Iron Lemonade,” another one-trick-pony, gallops ’round the yard nice enough, and “Fields are Breathing” turns into an intimate, fuzzy lil’ cubbyhole once it gets past a holding pattern.
There are a few tunes that don’t hold up as well, but the problem here isn’t the way the songs are put together (though the banjo plucks in “American Face Dust” suck). The cancer gnawing away at Eating Us like an army of termites is its wooden soul, its sense of deja vu, its lack of newness.
This raisin is covered with the same old wrinkles, and it makes one wonder if BMSR possess anything fresh to show us, any tricks up their sleeve. I’d be perfectly happy poring over another dozen albums just like this one if need be, but I — and, I think, a lot of indie folk — had placed a lot of high hopes on the future of this band.
And still do; Eating Us is far from a reason to defect from the Black Moth Super Club. It’s got the same beats, layers, effects, synths, vocoders and personality you loved the last time around, and to find fault with merely a Good album seems vain with all the crap clogging music culture these days.
That said, I was hoping for more, and I think Black Moth Super Rainbow can give us more, someday.
