For an artist, consistency is a murky indicator of success. What looks like the honing of craft and technique via repetition can easily be confused for homogeneity and a Clive Cussler-esque predictability. You run the risk of being trapped on an artistic treadmill if you don't decide to throw some of your old tricks in the garbage. And it's awfully hard. But in all arts, be it writing, or the making of psychedelic pop music, sometimes you have to kill all your darlings.
Last time we saw Black Moth Super Rainbow it was 2012, and they were riding high off the spoils of Kickstarter booty and an album that was an index for how far they had come. In* Cobra Juicy*, Tom Fec and his merry band of freaks seemed to have finally revealed the intimations of a more mature musical project. Fast forward to November of last year: With no sixth album in sight, Black Moth Super Rainbow decided to unload, in their own words, "neon flavored outtakes from a 6th album that doesn't yet exist." SeeFu Lilac is just that, outtakes and fragments, musical ephemera at best, perfectly suited for the rabid BMSR fanbase but not much else.
Clocking in at a scant 19 minutes, SeeFu Lilac is a collection of nine songs which slavishly adhere to the sounds and tropes which made BMSR famous in the first place. The ubiquitous vocoder vocals and the patina of vintage synths are all here, along with the same self-satisfied, isolationist nostalgia, which to some paints BMSR as refreshingly authentic and to others gimmicky cranks who haven't listened to an album made after the year 1993. When the band released a stream of the record on Facebook, they proudly rallied against trendiness or marketability, proclaiming "no glam shots, no press releases, no problem."
The one thing that separates SeeFu Lilac from previous BMSR efforts is the noticeable change in disposition. The record as a whole feels sunnier and the nostalgia is less sinister and somehow saccharine. Gone is the seething pop evil that coated Cobra Juicy. Instead of toeing the line between beautiful and grotesque, in these sketches of songs BMSR is trying to sound more subdued and much prettier. Seefu Lilac's most exciting moments come in small instrumental bursts that are calming and melodic. In the album's title track, a ruminative acoustic guitar is put in conversation with a wall of warm synths, and the result is nicely organic and effortless. It gives a hint of the sound BMSR might want to work with in future records.
They benefit from uncluttering their music and removing the fading drapery of distorted effects and wonky inversions, because it showcases what made BMSR so interesting earlier in the 2000s: vintage gear and earnest analog sentimentalism. But this sentimentalism is the very reason why this record is so uninteresting: It's a love letter to their previous work.
I wonder if Fec should toss the vocoder aside. The same suite of effects used to achieve the throaty and warbled vocals hasn't changed at all since Dandelion Gum. At this point, it wouldn't be unfair to say that it's become a gimmick, especially when deployed to tackle subjects like love or loss. The vocoder flattens and parodies whatever emotions a song might be meditating on. In "Since You've Seen Her," it's hard to take Fec seriously as he sadly croons "make a wish" over and over again.
In a recent interview addressing the album, Fec said that he thought a lot of contemporary music felt "so desperate." He made sure to backtrack and soften this statement, saying that: "Maybe I am kind of a recluse, and maybe..I don't have the greatest perspectives of everything." Fec has painted himself as an outsider for years, and it's not surprising that he finds so much of music just outside his lair unrelatable; you can hear it in the music he makes. It's the product of living in an echo chamber and not paying attention to the changes in both DIY and synth-driven music in the last four years. Fec has admitted to a certain amount of frustration with the sixth proper BMSR album, and the release of SeeFu Lilac is music he "needed to get out of [his] head" because it didn't fit in where he was going artistically. Hopefully Fec and friends have exorcised their nagging demons with SeeFu Lilac, and move forward into something very different.
