bmsr reviews (grave009)

I'm sure many of you have noticed this by now, but I tend to inject a lot of meta crap into these music reviews of mine. Meaning I'm just as likely to include some childhood recollection, internal narrative, pop culture reference, or even third-person commentary on my own writing as I am actual discussion of the album at hand. But it somehow only makes sense to me to include this massive web of information, however tangential it might be to the current review.

Much of the reason is that music is inextricably woven throughout my life, and as a result, my impressions of CDs are shaped as much by memory and experience as they are by any sort of "critical" opinion - hence the often lengthy, meandering, and journal-like nature of many of my reviews.

It's impossible for me discuss Soul Whirling Somewhere or Everything But The Girl and not mention the romantic travails those artists helped me get through. I can't write about Slowdive, Henryk Gorecki, or The Cocteau Twins and not write about the way they opened my heart and soul to beauty. And I can't write about Pedro The Lion or Ester Drang and not mention the way these artists impacted my own personal faith.

Somehow, I doubt any of this stuff makes my reviews the easiest to read, though hopefully they're interesting at the very least. But I can rarely do it any other way. To try and ignore it all seems to miss much of the point of why I listen to music in the first place. So bear with me as I get really meta while discussing Black Moth Super Rainbow's Start A People.

If you don't want to wade through a bunch of internal junk, and just want to know my opinion of the CD, then here's "The Official Opus Press Clipping": "It's like Boards Of Canada and Neutral Milk Hotel sitting down with Wayne Coyne to record a children's album inspired by the sounds of late 70's video games and public television fare such as 3-2-1 Contact and The Letter People, with an episode or two of Doctor Who thrown in for good measure." Now that that's out of the way, prepare for a journey through my own meta-narrative, if you will.

When I first started listening to Start A People, I was immediately reminded of two things. First was Pitchfork's "10.0" review of the recent re-issue of Boards Of Canada's landmark Music Has The Right To Children. Mark Richardson writes "Boards [Of Canada] managed to evoke childhood without seeming cute or twee. It's childhood not as it's lived but as we grown-ups remember it, at least those of us with less-than-fond recollections." Which dovetails quite nicely with Black Moth Super Rainbow's own artistic statement: "Black Moth Super Rainbow is made up of 3 to 6 members at any given time, who are focused on turning their childhood memories into songs."

Which dovetails quite nicely into the second leg of this meta-trip. A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with some friends, and our conversation turned to the TV shows we watched as kids. There were some common ones, such as Airwolf, Knight Rider, and The A-Team. But when two of us started talking about the public television we watched as young 'uns, the others, who were several years younger, just stared at us with quizzical expressions while we talked about Marian The Librarian and the late 70's output of the Children's Television Workshop.

I devoured those shows as a grade schooler, either at home when I was sick or on vacation, or when the teachers decided to let us watch one in class. But that was 20+ years ago, and even the shows' titles have faded from memory. But what does remain is the incidental music that accompanied those shows, or at least my memories of what I think the music was like.

To this day, stray melodic scraps will suddenly pop into my head only to disappear just as quickly, and I can still sing much of the theme song to "Marian The Librarian". But such things always remain hazy at best - a fact that is both warmly nostalgic and somewhat unsettling. And listening to Start A People, Black Moth Super Rainbow's second full-length, brings all of those half-decayed memories rushing back, and they're just as hazy, nostalgic, and vaguely unsettling as ever.

A lot of that has to do with the very sounds the band uses. Much of Black Moth Super Rainbow's sound palette will be very familiar to anyone who knows Boards Of Canada's music. Both groups share an affinity for lilting, slightly off-key analog sounds and murky, warped textures that are as lovely as they are because they sound so drowsy, as if on the verge of waking up though still half-dreaming.

However, Black Moth Super Rainbow takes a decidedly lo-fi approach to their music, making already warbly, indistinct sounds even moreso by saturating them with tape hiss and vinyl crackle, which gives their music a certain intimacy and charm not found in Boards Of Canada's music. Also, unlike Boards, crashing drums often propel the songs, achieving a careening balance not unlike the opening moments of The Soft Bulletin or In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.

Vocoderized voices can occasionally be heard drifting and flickering throughout, humming short little sun-drenched snippets like "Sundown came late today/When we die we go away" ("Vietcaterpillar"), "I'll just stand in the meadow/I'll be taken by sunbeams/So goodbye" ("I Think It Is Beautiful That You Are 256 Colors Too"), and "I can't believe in butterflies/Think about life and rainbows and death/And all of the things you've heard" ("Smile Heavy"). Though certainly trite and precious-like, such sentiments seem wholly appropriate for these nostalgia-ridden tunes.

When the band pensively intones "The sun came up late/Tomorrow never came" ("Hazy Field People") amidst mellow acoustic guitars and fluttery synths, it encapsulates the sentiment expressed by anyone who hasn't wanted to grow old, who has wished to remain in their (idealized) childhood. But I think the band realizes this as well - that any attempt to recapture youthful dreams can only succeed for just a moment before it too eventually fails, leaving one all the more wistful for recapturing what has been lost. We end up feeling the loss all the more keenly, and it's that inherent tragedy that explains why Start A People music is as beautiful, beguiling, and wondrous as it is.

And I think it would be impossible, and even pointless, to try to describe it any other way.

opus

There is a song by Air where the word "Remember" is spoken through a vocoder over and over again that really stuck in my head for a long time after listening to the song for the first time. Not that there aren't any electronic bands using that device in their music, but it's a very distinctive thing. So I think that Black Moth Super Rainbow (hereby abbreviated to BMSR, not to be confused with BMRC which is Black Rebel Motorcycle Club) will be getting a lot of comparisons to Air because of their use of the vocoder in their strange electro-pop songs, and also because like Air most of their songs are instrumental.

This CD, entitled Start A People, turned out to be a very interesting mix of songs wherein kaleidoscopic, wavering synths caper around old school backbeats. This is strange electronic fruit meant to be picked up by old hunter-gatherers of the 70s. They pull out some great samples with audio detritus still attached to the roots. Though the bulk of the music is electronic based, it doesn't come off as frigid or sterile at all. Rather the loopy and fat warm analog keyboards lend a little nostalgic sunshine and informality to their songs. There are playful video game - like repetitions throughout the songs, but they don't sound overtly digital or "Marioish". Stereolab and Broadcast fans may want to check out these mixes, though they might be a bit turned off by the complete lack of any singing. Still BMSR, who are "made up of 3 to 5 members at any given time" have created an interesting anachronistic document that can still by read by electronic music lovers of any age.

The thrill of starting again! From scratch, from the ground up. Black Moth Super Rainbow sound like they've never heard music in their life. They're a Petri dish culture playing Rhodes and singing into vocoders. Black Moth are coming out with instinctive music that sounds like a middle ground between the head-spinning breakbeat naiveté of Dosh crossed with the saccharine no-pace ballads of latter-day Mogwai.

All sorts of floaty little keyboard melodies criss-cross with pitched and distorted song, with all that is conventionally human removed from the vocals via vocoder, leaving sweet haikus sung by the proto-mandroid poets of Black Moth's new race. Delirious and simple, but never sickly-sweet, the songs are held together by strictly programmed drums, the only rigid element of this record. Meanwhile all the various tones spiral and bend in a way that mocks serious psychedelia and sounds pretty in the process.

My guess is that the musicians behind Black Moth Super Rainbow were at one stage faced with a choice: to make depressing music about the impending end, or to laugh in the face of fate and make a completely escapist Technicolor celebration of a new beginning (reminds me of Lightening Bolt minus the rhythm and speed).   

It's hard to take Start A People at face value. I can't imagine, for example, this record ever coming out on Ninja Tune, despite the evident stylistic similarities. The feeling of kitsch doesn't let up; the aesthetic sampling of trippy 70s children's programmes; the tonal unsteadiness. These things all point to an irony that faces inward.

But it's okay, cos it sounds really nice.   

-XvScott

It’s nothing short of a goddamned shame that the folks at Astralwerks Records, electronic super-label and the impetus behind all those recent Brian Eno re-releases, just weren’t diggin’ Black Moth Super Rainbow, but at least they were honest about it. BMSR, an exercise in paradoxical pop deconstruction, received Astralwerks’ “we’re not putting your disc out” form letter with a hand-drawn blue arrow pointing to choice number 3 of 5 of possible reasons to pass over a band.

“We just didn’t like it,” reads the infamous third selection, “We could easily be wrong about you, so don’t be deterred – what the hell do we know anyway, right?”
Oh, what frank yet, well, slightly smarmy words to hear from a label. But at least Astralwerks admits its own fallibility. They may have been right on about re-releasing all of those Brian Eno discs, and maybe even not releasing Start A People on the grounds of its commercially unviable weirdness. But “just plain not liking it”? Start A People is a disc that’s farther out in left field than your average disc by your average left field pop band, working the aesthetic of wobbly, creepy sex ed film strip soundtracks into loose pop frameworks, and in doing so creating uniquely disconcerting, teeth-grinding beauty.

Remember all the weird cartoons that ran on Nickelodeon’s “Pinwheel” in the early ‘80s? Back when “Pinwheel” was the only children’s TV programming on the air, and it ran for about 15 hours, bombarding you with enough uncomfortably sugary imagery yanked from the BBC to give your 5-year-old mind an existential limit-experience as much as entertain you? That’s the kind of paradox that Black Moth Super Rainbow evokes, quite viscerally. Beginning with “Raspberry Dawn,” a collage of electronic sounds; xylophones and synths that are as bent and warped as they are warm and fuzzy, Start A People is full of songs as playfully odd as they are appealingly uncomfortable.
For instance, in “Seeeds,” (yes, three es) synthesizers surge triumphantly, accompanied by requisite robot vocals, but the whole deal sounds like it’s enveloped by a veil of dated graininess. It’s hard not to expect to be prompted to turn to the next frame on the film-strip by a high pitched beep. Or to remember that you don’t have to get up and fix the old tape player that seems to be eating the song, for that matter. The track burns up and drops out at random points as if being acted on by a malfunctioning machine, then pops back to life just as inexplicably. A combination of avant-concept trickery like this and a bright, crazy haze turns would-be pop songs like “Trees and Colors and Wizards,” driven by the hard to remember refrain, “one, two, three, four, five,” into perplexing bits of near hallucinatory oddness.

What comparisons can be drawn to the sounds of the somewhat unfortunately but strangely appropriately named Black Moth Super Rainbow that don’t involve the original cast of Sesame Street, puppets and all, stoned out of their gourds? Maybe a slight touch of The Unicorns come through, not to overstate the similarity. To invoke Canada’s indie darlings in such a context, one would have to subtract most of the dance-pop sensibility, and crank up the weirdness level and existential subtext by some multiple of a thousand. And it never seems inappropriate, even given the uber-happy aesthetic, that Start A People is lyrically chocked full of existential angst, in “Smile Heavy’s retro-botic delivery of minimal, bleak poetry over a uber-saccharine synth line bent all to hell and back, “Why does the sun go down…/Why do we all go away?”

Never shy about focusing the concern that “everything [is] ending,” as stated in “I Think It’s Beautiful That You are 256 Colors Too,” Black Moth is damn well aware of how somber and unsettling the bizarre alcoves of nostalgia that Start A People explores can get. With sunshiny prettiness and almost frightening wistfulness inextricably linked, Start A People indulges the familiar illogic of being simultaneously entertained and very deeply freaked out.

—Matthew Stern

Besides having one of the best band names I’ve heard in a long time, the self-styled "electronic junk band" Black Moth Super Rainbow have taken on the challenging and intriguing venture of re-creating the sounds of the early 70’s, as heard through the ears of a child. Pretty ambitious, considering none of the band’s members were even alive in the 1970’s! Well, speaking from the point of view of someone who was a child of the early 70’s, I can tell you this album somehow did manage to induce fond and patchy memories of my early youth. Nothing specific, you understand. That’s the magic of Start a People. It can take you back to a time you think you remember, without actually remembering it. Does that make sense? Who knows? But I think this album could just as easily appeal those who were not necessarily a child of that era as can to those who were.

With an array of analogue synths at their disposal, mangled tapes, and cheerfully cheesy vocorderized vocals, Black Moth Super Rainbow comes across as sort of a lo-fi, more experimental version of the French duo Air, with a lot more warmth and dizzyingly fragmented nostalgia thrown in for good measure. Great titles like Raspberry Dawn, I Think It’s Beautiful That You are 256 Colors Too, Early 70’s Gymnastics, Folks With Magik Toes, and I Am the Alphabet evoke the colorful, sunshiny magic television world of Make a Wish, Sesame Street, H.R. Puff n’ Stuff, and School House Rock without ever making a single specific reference to any of those.

What can I say? This album was a complete surprise and I totally dug it. I think you’ll dig it too. Welcome to the 70’s, man.

aural innovations