Black Moth's release painfully average
Yes, it's one of those bands.
Published May 1, 2007
As you could imagine, a band called Black Moth Super Rainbow is completely impossible to Google Image. What its members look like is completely a mystery to me, but I imagine they look like the long-lost members of Brightblack Morning Light dressed in the finest threads from the Devendra Banhart Spring Collection.
Who they are is even a bigger mystery. BMSR has kept its public identity mostly under wraps since its inception. So as far as we know, the names of the band members are as follows: Tobacco, The Seven Fields of Aphelion, Power Pill Fist, Iffernaut and Father Hummingbird. Yes, it's one of those bands.
This is living-out-in-the-woods-for-days-with-no-shower music, but it's not your stereotypical hippie, smoke-out-and-zone-out music.
BMSR filters its psychedelia through Rhodes pianos, Mellotrons and other gauzy synths. The vocals are run so intensely through vocoders that calling the singing on this album "human" is dubious at best.
But it more than works for Dandelion Gum. The fact that the vocals are robotic gives the album a Daft Punk-eqsue otherworldliness. Except, instead of sounding like being in space, Dandelion Gum would be the music playing if aliens abducted you on a sunny day in the middle of a meadow.
"I love to be with you, and the sun will rise, the sun will rise," the vocals ominously moan on standout "Sun Lips." Behind it, two different but equally addictive synth melodies are laid on so thick it's almost smothering.
"Sun Lips" is the epitome of what Black Moth Super Rainbow does best. It's lazy, hypnotic synth-pop, obviously nodding toward advocating the use of psychedelic drugs. At Dandelion Gum's best, it, like in the case of "Sun Lips," almost transports you to another place entirely, a place that more often than not feels like one memory or moment is being stretched out for days.
If all of Dandelion Gum operated in this same sleepy, hazy manner, it would be 2007's answer to Brightblack's gloriously buzzing self-titled album from last year. Instead, BMSR reaches for more upbeat, dancey and typical synth-pop, and Dandelion Gum becomes not only boring, but it also loses its focus, which would suggest that Black Moth intended for Dandelion Gum to be sluggish and druggy as "Sun Lips" or "Afternoon Turns Pink." If those are the departures from the roller disco of, say, "Rollerdisco" or the bouncy "They Live in the Meadow," then they are spectacular departures.
What's ultimately baffling and frustrating about Dandelion Gum is Black Moth's insistence on fucking around with more buoyant tracks. I can't fault a group for trying to exude bliss with its music, but what I hoped Dandelion Gum would be - and what it ultimately should be — isn't what it is.
Which isn't to say either that the lesser parts of Dandelion Gum are bad necessarily, but rather just painfully average. Its synth-pop is not nearly as smooth, elegant or as well constructed as Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? or YACHT's I Believe in You Your Magic is Real.
The problem lies in the fact that when going up-tempo, BMSR insists on still running its vocals through a vocoder, which basically puts them in slow motion.
This dichotomy between the two means that neither the vocals nor the instrumentation is in accord with the other, especially when considering how well the vocoderizing works with the down-tempo.
As a whole, hit or miss is about an apt description of Dandelion Gum as there is. The mesmerizing "Sun Lips" is reason enough to give the album a try, but not nearly enough to keep it above water.
