Black Moth Super Rainbow

I've got another interview up at PopMatters, this one with Tobacco, the auteur behind Black Moth Super Rainbow.


Transcending Logic: An Interview with Black Moth Super Rainbow


By Jennifer Kelly 26 November 2012


“Black Moth Super Rainbow is not drug music,” says Tobacco, the main singer and songwriter behind one of indie rock’s trippiest sounding bands. “If you want to use it to enhance your experiences, that’s fine, but I get kind of bothered sometimes when everyone’s so quick to credit drugs for making this stuff.”


Black Moth Super Rainbow has been making its candy-colored, vocoder-filtered, Rhodes-and-synthesizer-shimmering psych since the mid-00s, emerging, appropriately enough (at least in lepidopteral terms), from another band called satanstompingcaterpillars.
The band’s third album Dandelion Gum was the break out, pulling in giddily positive reviews and, er, a bunch of drug references. I myself, writing for PopMatters, opined that “Dandelion Gum is one of those records that makes you feel like you’re high, even when you’re not, like you’re on the verge of shambolic visions, even if you’re taking out the trash, like there’s an ineffable order to the universe, even when all signs point to chaos. ”


The association with contraband has dogged Black Moth Super Rainbow through its sprawling collaboration with the Octopus Project, its Dave Fridmann-helmed Eating Us and, now, the band’s fifth album, Cobra Juicy. Tobacco, who goes by the name of Thomas Fec in the real world, has just gotten back from a six-mile bike ride when we talk. He says that he gets more out of cycling and running and hanging out with friends than from any artificial substance. He doesn’t even take drugs.


Tobacco is fine with the idea of alternate realities. In fact, he explains his band’s use of nicknames (Seven Fields of Aphelion, Iffernaut, etc.), masks, film, and costumes as a way of creating a self-contained musical universe. “I just never wanted music to be attached to a person. I just wanted it to be its own world, with its own visuals and names,” he says.


But, Tobacco maintains, it is not a world that you need a pill, a joint or any other kind of chemical assistance to enter. “People just don’t want to use their imagination,” he says. “The easiest thing is, ‘Ah, it’s just drugs.’ Then you don’t have to think about it. But it has nothing to do with it.”

More

Kind of disturbing, this video for "Windshield Smasher"


I like "Hairspray Heart" the best anyway.

How can I, how can I, stop in the middle?

I wonder if Graveface is really his name? If not, he sure likes the sound of it, since Ryan Graveface has named both his one-man band and his label Graveface. The label, you might know as the home of Black Moth Super Rainbow, a trippy, synthy, altogether fantastic psych-pop-break-beat outfit that Graveface sometimes plays bass in. The band, you also might have heard of, a year or two ago when I reviewed The Long Forgotten Friend for PopMatters. I liked it a lot. I like the new one modestly less, though it’s not exactly a throwaway. I noted, at Venus last week, that it has “a far more rustic aesthetic than on The Long Forgotten Friend, spurning the shimmer of sustained guitars and lulling prettiness of reverbed vocals for a four-square, heel-rocking country feel”


The rest of the piece


“Magnesium Light”

I’m back from Indiana and very glad to be here, though school’s started and we are all getting up at 5:30 again, ugh.

Black Moth Super Rainbow

I've got a live review of Black Moth Super Rainbow and Soundpool up now at Blurt.

Check it out here, if you like.

Sleeping is so underrated

My son, Sean, just started high school on Wednesday, which means, among other things, that he has to catch a 6:22 a.m. bus and we are all getting up at 5:30 to see him off. (I believe they start early so as to get the kids home early in the afternoon, so they have a couple of hours to smoke pot and have sex before their parents get home.) Anyway, it’s been a little rough, getting used to this, though it does seem to make the day considerably longer and I’ve been getting a bunch of stuff done. What it makes really, really hard is going out at night, but last night I went anyway.

I went to see Black Moth Super Rainbow and Soundpool and had a really surprisingly good time. BMSR is, apparently hugely more popular than I knew…there was a line around the block to get in, and everybody in it was half my age…except for some people right behind me who seemed mostly to go to more established stuff (they were talking about the Allman brothers and Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears) and were probably still younger, but less so.

I would highly, highly recommend going to see BSMR if you get a chance…everything airy and candy-colored and trippy about their sound solidifies and becomes a lot heavier on stage. You get way more of a sense of the bass and drums (the drummer is terrifically good, almost a break-beat style, very hard and dry and syncopated) and they have a pretty amusing video show projected onto a bedsheet behind them. Soundpool was also pretty good, though more pop, sort of an Asobi Seksu…School of Seven Bells-ish female-vocals, shoegaze-y thing with, again, an excellent funk-centric drum/bass underpinning and some pretty wild effect-y stuff going on with the guitar. It’s definitely got some disco, some super pop, but also shades of kraut and MBV…wish I could have heard it better and knew the music going in.

I’ll be writing more about all that later, but in the meantime, here’s a video of each

Oh, and this was cool, my son and my husband let me sleep through the 5:30 call this morning, and I feel like a human being again today. Also no football or anything until Tuesday, so maybe we will sleep in and go to the movies this weekend.

BMSR’s “Born on a Day in the Sun”


Soundpool’s “The Divides of March”