Black Moth Super Rainbow apparently consists of a few pals with funny nicknames like Tobacco and Father Hummingbird, who dress strangely, occasionally wear masks, and make music together off in some isolated rural area near Pittsburgh. It all sounds suspiciously engineered to cultivate an image for the band as eccentric pop outsiders. Fortunately, the backstory doesn't matter much, because the first thing to do with a record like BMSR's latest, Dandelion Gum, is to forget about who made it: The music discourages any engagement with personality. For one thing, the album's vocals are warped beyond repair by vocoder, even when its tracks occasionally veer toward a mutant electronic version of sun-drenched folk-pop. Most of the time, you can't understand a thing being said, but here, that's not a problem: The meaning of the music comes through regardless.
As a band, Black Moth Super Rainbow, have been toiling away for a few years now, amassing several full-lengths, CD-Rs, and collaborations, most notably a 2006 split EP with the Octopus Project. But where the group's earlier records, when not traveling a purely instrumental path, incorporated more or less "regular" singing, Dandelion Gum takes a big risk: It relies on a single vocal filter throughout the course of the entire album. Typically, a processed voice so readily becomes the focus of a song that, without at least some change to the effect, a full record can seem samey or redundant. Luckily, Black Moth have an unusual enough mood going here that the uniformity becomes a strength. The vocals are playful but not played for laughs; to me they sound claustrophobic, almost sickly. It's not a voice that brings shiny singing robots to mind, but rather people who've spent so much time indoors that their bodies have begun to change in unhealthy ways. To that end, the vocoder gives the record a shade of darkness it wouldn't otherwise have.
The keyboards throughout sound vintage, with textures that bring to mind Mellotron and Moog, while the guitars are thin, trebly, and speckled with analog dust. The central pulsating riff of "Sun Lips" sounds an awful lot like the dream-channeled refrain of "Strawberry Fields Forever", even as it's used in service of what is ultimately a tremendously simple little pop tune. "We miss you in summertime," the singer (that would be Tobacco on the mic) intones through his machine, and since it seems kind of like a love song, the presence of "we" is a little odd. Does he have a mouse in his pocket? Maybe it's one of those songs that seems directed to a woman but is really about weed. Somehow, though, it works. Chalk it up to the world of this album.
If much of Dandelion Gum sounds like something recorded at home on the cheap, "Rollerdisco", which forms an impressive 1-2 punch after "Sun Lips", demonstrates that Black Moth gets the most out of their modest set-up. Like much of their past work, it comes over like a spry, airy, and tremendously evocative instrumental Boards of Canada interlude, from back when the Scottish duo still did that sort of thing. And the acoustic guitar loop in "Jump Into My Mouth and Breathe the Stardust" has the old-tape-found-under-a-tree-stump vibe that gave BoC's The Campfire Headphase an appealing sense of water-damaged psychedelia. Early Beck is even invoked on "Melt Me", which sounds an awful lot like what "Devil's Haircut" would have been had Carl Stephenson helped lay it down for Mellow Gold. Still, despite the occasionally folky melodic sensibility, Black Moth's aesthetic is always spacey-- they're more likely to be scoring a laser show at a planetarium than busking on a street corner.
Wherever these guys are holed up and whether or not they really call the drummer Iffernaut, Dandelion Gum is a nice surprise and a good example of why doing one thing very well is sometimes more than enough.
