Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Tobacco — who released an amazing solo record last year as well — knows his way around a vocoder. No matter how often he says he wants to get away from it, there it is, smack-dab in the middle of everything he does.
“Don’t You Want to Be in a Cult,” the A-side of a 12″ pic-disc that came out in early 2009 on Mexican Summer Records, flaunts vocoder bliss like diamond wrist watches in downtown Zoo York. The vocoder blings, for god’s sake. This ongoing saga — continued with the lesser Eating Us, out earlier this year as well — amounts to one of the most unique vocal personas known to indie-rock.
“Cult” is the kind of cut that Black Moth Super Rainbow carved their neon-pink name on. Band standards include synth-flutes, synth-strings, synth-harpischord; synth-everything pretty much, laid flat overtop post-Anticon hip-hop beats. It’s a limited combination that has linked albums like Dandelion Gum, Fucked Up Friends and Drippers together like Polish sausages.
I’ve found I prefer this to constant tweaking, which often leads to a creaky, unsure sound (and, yes, can lead to absolute genius). I say let BMSR go with their style for a few more albums; the approach has bode them well thus far and still has plentiful ground to cover.
This 12″ is an example of the rich territory Tobacco and co. are mining. “Don’t You Want to Be in a Cult,” as mentioned, is a typical Black Moth Super Rainbow, in full flush. It’s colorful and zesty.
“Feel the Drip” is druggier, synth-ier — if that’s possible — lighter, and much more fascinating, pregnant with zim-zam-zoom-ing swirls of sound and more complex keystrokes than usual. Its train-on-tracks buzz is more redolent of Tobacco’s solo LP than the BMSR stuff, and …HOLY SHIT … there’s no vocoder; not even one.
If there were a track I’d point to as a mapping point for what I’d like to hear more of from this Philadelphia group, “Feel the Drip” and a tune or two from Fucked Up Friends would probably represent the coordinates. There’s a lot of tension to be had, a lot of scene-setting before the big payoff.
Any entity that can put together a song as ambitious as “Drip” deserves to be watched closely. Despite my qualms with Eating Us, my thoughts have stayed with Black Moth Super Rainbow for some time now. I expect them to expand, if not to Animal Collective proportions, perhaps to M83 proportions.
I just hope they avoid sucking huge, throbbing man-balls like M83 have so thoroughly (here is a fantastic review by a colleague of mine in the journalism world; also read her often music-related column HERE) since the wonderful Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts.
That would be, well, devastating.
