Black Moth Super Rainbow
Start a People
Graveface
A2P rating: 4.5

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

COLUMNS
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INTERVIEW
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BOOKS- Reviews
Poetry and What Is Real - R. Tillinghast

BOOKS - Interview
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MUSIC - Interviews
Gore Gore Girls Gone Wild
Keane

MUSIC - Reviews
Black Moth Super Rainbow - Start a People
Monster Movie - Transistor

MOVIES
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