Black Moth Super Rainbow are a dream for fans of weird and offbeat music: They've always seemed more a "collective" than proper band, trading on the whims of unknown numbers of masked and aliased folks. They have their own typeface, side projects (frontman Tobacco's 2008 album Fucked Up Friends), split EPs, and an enclave (Pittsburgh). Yet now Eating Us, the band's fourth album, emerging from undisclosed Pennsylvania woodland recording sessions to roost in producer Dave Fridmann's Tarbox Road Studios, the band's first professional recording experience. The result is a crisper, more linear sound that, somewhat surprisingly, places substantial emphasis on the band's songwriting.
Whether a conscious choice or a byproduct of Fridmann's noted, um, flattening tendencies, Eating Us is less reliant on the analog bass rumble featured prominently on Dandelion Gum. The beats, while still machinated and tweaked, seem more attuned to rock norms, popping reliably on the 2s and 4s. Analog-y synth noise still gobbles space, but the filters and oscillators no longer wild off in strange directions; they are musical instruments, making music. The vocals still exclusively feature vocoder effects, but the sugar-swamp flow is less molasses, more maple syrup. The lyrics are still rightly fucked-- "Iron lemonade/ Wash my friends away/ Na, na na na na na"-- but they're mostly decipherable.
These aren't necessarily backward steps: Album opener "Born on a Day the Sun Didn't Rise"-- possibly the first linear BMSR song-- moves like an Elephant 6 track. Choppy, descending chords, boxy drums, and citric acid-vocals push toward a bridge featuring, of all things, a string section. The industrial distortion that congeals near the end of "Iron Lemonade" has guitar lines wrapped around it like yarn, and the whole song benefits from its taut, careful groove. A banjo lopes throughout "American Face Dust"; "Twin of Myself" might have a real chorus.
BMSR are still appropriately weird-- "Wash my friends away" is a request. But they're also gentler, more coherent. Close your eyes and place "Twin of Myself" against any of the songs you might have forgotten from At War With the Mystics. The gentle sighs and acoustic guitars of "Bubblegum Animals" and "Fields Are Breathing" feel pastoral, a label that seems slight in the shadow of BMSR's forest-groove madness. Songs tend to be followed by... more songs, and not the rippling Moog-fevers that often threatened Dandelion Gum (there is no "Caterpillar House", no "Rollerdisco"). Damn if "Gold Splatter", at four-plus minutes and the recipient of a string outro, doesn't just feel long.
Dandelion Gum exhibited the sort of singular style that incites folks to think, about its creators, that they could make records like this for the rest of their career. But maybe not; Dandelion Gum was speckled and silly and high as shit. Eating Us feels more like the baseline: collected, repeatable, respectable. You know, regular, at least to the point that melting faces and "fucked-up dreams" can be regular.
