(If you have ever listened to any of the Disintegration Loops-tapes and wondered about Time and Decay and the connection between the two,
taken a hypnagogic walk through a sleeping town,
wondered how the hi-fi version of a lo-fi record would sound,
mistakenly taken an impersonator for the real thing
or discussed whether a tree falling in a forest when no one is near actually makes a sound,
you will know what I'm getting into here.)
It takes only a cursory glimpse at the tracklistings comprising Black Moth Super Rainbow's discography to realize this band has only one foot in the real world and the other in alternate realms. They are interested in the transition, the evolution, the alternation, the perversion of the real thing. Everything they do is hidden under layers, behind masks, or if everything else fails, behind (admittedly thinly) veiled metaphors. Just take their latest record, Psychic Love Damage: a smashed windshield in the opening song immediately hinders your sight. Then they eat sundaes, hairspray their heart, get burned, throw dreamsicle bombs, and blur the day with spraypaint. Their world is so obfuscated that you get suspicious: what are they hiding?
It's not just the track titles. Musically, they hide behind warped synthesizers and vocoder vocals. Visually behind masks. And lyrically.. well. Hairspray Heart entrances you with its mantra of I-can-hyp-no-tize-you-I-can-hyp-no-tize-you-I-can. Some other flards of text are equally somnambulent: I've wasted all my daylight… peeling like a sunburn… subliminally… this house is raining all the time… dizzy dizzy lips so sticky… dipped in glitter.
Even when they refer to real activities, things to do that are not either transient, see-through or saturated, their choices are a bit off. They have a long-running obsession with rollerdisco. Dandelion Gum, from 2007, already featured a song with that name, and in their Kickstarter project for the funding of their latest record they offered to arrange a rollerdisco for one lucky rich kid and his lucky rich-kid friends, complete with band-provided DJ set. Hairspray, gasoline and rollerskates, they sing in Windshield Smasher. That just about sums it up. But the thing about rollerdiscos is that it is so tied to the 70s and the disco age, to hairspray and glitter, yes, and outlandish haircuts. Any modern day variant of this would automatically be considered retro and would not be appreciated for the event itself but for its connections to the past. For the people who actually were around in the 70s, this is just fun nostalgia, and they would no doubt be somewhat bemused if their heirs dabble around in what they consider their private playgrounds. It's like David Berman says (yes, another reference to him, just bear with me):
It's just that our advances are irrepressible.
Nowadays little kids can't even set up lemonade stands.
It makes people too self-conscious about the past,
though try explaining that to a kid.
(Berman does add afterwards that he's 'not saying it should be this way', for what it's worth).
So BMSR's rollerskating frenzy is once again a perversion of the real thing. From their and the indie kids' point of view it's awfully close to what James Murphy - in Losing My Edge - dubbed "borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered 80s", if we allow ourselves the liberty to change the decennium in that citation.
Despite all of this, you'll be surprised to hear that - on this new record more than ever - the emotions do break through the surface. There is an obvious love theme in the lyrics of Psychic Love Damage ("I can see myself being with yourself when the summer buzz starts wearing off" and "now that I got you my dreams are good" are two obvious examples). But nowhere before has the band even come close to the straightforward yearning of album closer Spraypaint: it's a slow hazy (even by their standards) jam where Tobacco repeatedly admits first to being "fucked up when I'm living without you" and then "I couldn't need you more". Finally all the smoke and mirrors has been done away with, and there's just the pure, honest thing left: and I think it's their most beautiful song, yet.
