Black Moth Super Rainbow
“Baby’s In The Void”
Panic Blooms
And Panic does bloom. Beware. In less than a month, TOBACCO and company are going to drop their new album on an unsuspecting world. This album is raw and beautiful, disturbing and magical. I have to quote their official bio to give you the true perspective on the dark-forested Pennsylvania band. (Being from North-east Ohio, western PA, I know those dark forests of PA).
For the last decade, BMSR and frontman TOBACCO have explored the periphery of evil and extreme color, alternating between absurdly bright beauty and the slashed throat sinister. A sound impossible to replicate, as though it burst fully formed from a paisley-painted fire hydrant stationed in hell. They combine the aesthetically gorgeous with the hideously ugly to create a psychedelic uneasiness usually only seen in old oil paintings. What if Goya or Bosch made ravaged vocoder pop? Or a neo-impressionist painter committed himself to creating slow woozy earworms so iridian and vivid you’d think he sliced off an ear in the process.
We know scarcely anything personal about BMSR frontman TOBACCO. There’s his government name, Tom Fec. A few photos if you want to Google, most of them in a mask. He’s done enough interviews where he patiently breaks down the creative process and the ideas espoused, but has mostly resisted the soul-snuffing admissions expected from contemporary musicians. In that vein, he’s closer to a Boards of Canada, DOOM, or Aphex Twin—periodically visible but opaque—emotional but unwilling to exploit the self-mythology and cult that cropped up around him.
So maybe this is why Panic Blooms is slightly startling. Never before has TOBACCO been so raw or direct in his lyrics. It’s a f-ed up and bleeding account of depression and the shadow side of human frailty, full of gorgeous warped melodies that exist as their own genre, somewhere between late 90s Warp Records, dub, and chopped and screwed codeine drip. It’s not drug music, it’s dragged music, oozing through the muck of the present moment, past mutating the present, demon melodies filtered through the vain search for light.
Explore the dark. Enjoy the trip. There has never been a band quite like Black Moth Super Rainbow. They seem to bring all the darkness of life and push it.