Black Moth Super Rainbow

Dandelion Gum

(Graveface)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

The cover of this CD scares me. It looks like a bad acid trip forced into a world of My Little Ponies and Japanese metal bands playing stoner rock for hippie candy freaks. Yeah, and that’s just the album cover. Seventeen songs, most of them between one and a half and almost three minutes long. Looks like my idea of stoner rock is out… no epic eight-minute jams here… but the music does hit the stoner part, if not the rock so much. Psychedelic trippy voyages into outer space hitting like some Air meets Beck meets Jean-Michel Jarre and moves into the Tardis to jam with Dr. Who. Some pretty strange stuff here, kids.

The vocals are constant throughout the whole album, singing through some sort of sad indie robot filter, so all you get is a sort of electronic voice reciting over solid beats and snippets of sound. Maybe a flute solo breaking into a keyboard riff, with guitar backdrops pushing out the rhythm would be good… oh wait, here comes one. Marvin the Robot starts a band after listening to some Boards of Canada and a little Jethro Tull. I feel like I’m on drugs after the second song. What color is music? It’s Black Moth Super Rainbow. Dig it. The band moves into some funky electro dance territory with songs like “Lollipopsichord”, which sounds like a vacuum cleaner doing a disco rock under a Japanese gong, and “rollerdisco” which is a lot mellower than it sounds, but I can still picture the indie kids dancing. The strangest part of this album, is that even though it’s freaking me out, it’s still calming and mellow at the same time, making my head feel like soft fuzz and making my feet tap to some atmospheric dancefloor beat. I could continue, but it would probably start making even less sense from here on in.