Pennsylvania experimental rock ensemble Black Moth Super Rainbow hit retro and modern notes all at once with their day-glo vibrant electro-dance melodies, fizzadelic folk shambles and made-for-space jams. It's some of the headiest music you'll find out there right now, but songwriter/frontman/creative conscience Tobacco (real name Tom Fec) doesn't consider his music psychedelic at all.
"I think everything I do is pop," he told me a few weeks ago during a phone interview before the second leg of the band's two-part tour. "I don't like psychedelic music and I never set out to do it. It just sort of comes out that way. I might be the only person who thinks this, but Eating Us … it seems like a pop album to me."
Eating Us, his band's fourth and latest full-length, is not the sort of name that makes you think pop. The black-and-white album cover, with its smeary sad face superimposed onto the back of a hand, doesn't make me think of pop music, either. And the limited edition "hairy" version of Eating Us (with synthetic hair in its inner sleeve) is probably as far from pop packaging as you can feasibly get.
Tobacco explains his definition of "pop": songs that get their point across in two or three minutes, that have catchy vocals and instrumentals, that are influenced by experimental techniques used in pop music of the '60s and '70s. "If everyone could just get over the fact that it's not what they're used to hearing…" he muses.
But while Black Moth's music is sticky, glittery and bright like pop, it's too off-kilter and sonically adventurous to have true mainstream appeal. And the songs have titles like "Fields Are Breathing" and "Born on a Day the Sun Didn't Rise," and blotter paper lyrics ("Iron lemonade, wash my friends away / Neon lemonade, eat my face away") delivered via whispery-warm vocoderfied vocals set against a swirling symphony of synthesized sound. It's hard to think anything but hallucinatory thoughts when listening.
Surprisingly, Black Moth has toned down the face-melting mania and glitchy noise of their previous three albums. Eating Us is more wistful, dreamy and laid-back than Black Moth has ever sounded. Tobacco admits he made a concentrated effort to steer clear of his really gritty "coming over the speaker system at a public pool" sound. "I thought it would be better to just focus on making the songs as clear as possible, just to see if they could hold up under a more traditional type of treatment."
The album was recorded atTarbox Road Studios and marks the first time Black Moth has ventured into a modern recording studio and made a hi-fi album. "Everything I do is normally at home over years," says Tobacco, who writes the music solo and brings his finished ideas to the band. Eating Us is also the first Black Moth album to feature live drumming instead of drum machine fills as well as in-studio assistance and tracking by Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann.
Bass, drums and a collection of vintage analog synthesizers and keyboards paired with Tobacco's vocoder-processed vocals help the band achieve their distinctive antique electronica feel. "They are the sound."
Nothing is sequenced or sampled or pre-recorded in a live setting, and Tobacco admits the band doesn't really attempt to engage the audience. The visuals projected onto a screen behind the band are created by Tobacco himself and play throughout each performance "to entertain people, and also to distract from the fact that we are sort of just concentrating on what we are doing."
Black Moth initially evolved from a series of musical projects by Tobacco and his bassist cousin Power Pill Fist (real name Ken Fec). The two played together for several years before teaming up with some other Pittsburgh-area musicians — Seven Fields of Aphelion (Maureen Boyle), Father Hummingburd (Seth Ciotti) and IFfernaut (Donna Kyler) — to form Black Moth Super Rainbow in 2003. They put out two albums before getting picked up by Graveface Records in 2005, which were re-released shortly thereafter along with a new EP, Lost, Picking Flowers in the Woods. Black Moth brewed up a fresh electro-rock record with The Octopus Project in 2006, kept the indie buzz going with a successful SXSW debut in 2007, and went on to release a much-lauded candy-coated third full-length, Dandelion Gum, also in 2007, which led to opening slots later that year for Aesop Rock and the Flaming Lips.
Black Moth was mostly quiet in 2008 while Tobacco and Power Pill Fist did the solo thing, though they satiated fans in November with The Drippers EP, a compilation of lost tracks from the Dandelion Gum era among other odds and ends. The fivesome re-converged to record Eating Us in early 2009.
Tobacco says he has no real plans for any future recordings with Black Moth, and says that after this tour, "I think I just want to do something else for a minute and stop thinking about all this Black Moth stuff."
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2009.