Send "Tobacco " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Urb |
 If this review could reflect the mirrored disc that spawned it, it’d be written backwards in Wingding fonts and make little sense. On his first solo, Tobacco (of Black Moth Super Rainbow) orchestrates a bubble gum soundtrack, gum with acid tabs where the Bazooka Joe comics go. Behold, Fucked Up Friends: cryptic fun for open, inebriated, and comatose minds. With beat machine bumps, backroom snares, mozzarella-mold distortion, and trusty analog synths, Tobacco’s psychadelia-hop is modern kaleidoscopian (think Deelite circa 1990). Decidedly lo-fi, Fucked is either a random Pollack-upchuck, or a deliberate, ingenious force-fuck of epileptic-bob insanity. Vocal samples muddied and mutated, haunting several tracks devoid of original character and reborn Frankenstein re-stiches of personality and charm....full text |
| Cokemachineglow |
| My very first introduction to the dry-cured, sweetly flavored music of Tobacco was through his work with Pittsburgh pop monsters Black Moth Super Rainbow (BMSR). Around this time last year Aesop Rock had just dropped None Shall Pass, a circus sideshow of a record and one of his best efforts since the breakthrough Labor Days (2001). Through Aesop’s MySpace I saw that BMSR was opening for a bunch of dates on his tour. Being the MySpace slut that I am, I crept my way over to find out what kind of unkempt hippie collective had an album named Dandelion Gum (2007). I was immediately greeted by a combination of hallucinatory tape distortions, fuzzed-out keys, and jangled beats—the quintessential BMSR sound. I became an instant fan of the collective but it was the signature vocoder overdrive of Tobacco’s hymn-like lyrics that sealed the deal. While Kanye West, T-Pain, and a host of other pop hustlers pimped their own auto-tuned meander out to the star-struck public last year, Tobacco was holed up in his native Pittsburgh sewing together what would become Fucked Up Friends. Touted by the artist, seemingly without the rest of the band’s affirmation, as the unofficial follow up to Dandelion Gum, this sixteen-song collection takes off into a different cerebral space than the beatific, mellotronic head phases of his regular gig. The playful harmonics and twisted melodic themes of BMSR are isolated by Tobacco in his lab and given thorough taffy-pulling, effectively stretching out time and space as we know it for as far as the eye can see. One in three adults will be addicted....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Safariing through the psychedelic wilderness while wearing Black Moth Super Rainbow’s hazy Technicolor goggles is a bit like drinking strawberry wine (a la My Bloody Valentine) with bubblegum (a la pop radio). They’re two sugary flavors that don’t seem to match but have an oddly synergistic and synesthetic reaction when combined. In their world, Boards of Canda is a party band and the mass-marketed non-professional Casiotone is an electric guitar. It’s a world where hits are tested in roller rinks rather than dance clubs and a vocoder is like a second tongue. Black Moth Super Rainbow have always had a knack for isolating the most glacially cool phrases an analogue synth can make and taking them out for spin. Yet, while their music is full of good ideas, they rarely riff on those good ideas, resulting in music that you’d really want to like if it didn’t sound so flat and uninvolved. The sole exception in their discography is last year’s excellent Dandelion Gum (whose titled invokes an ‘80s electro-glorious recitation of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine), which kept the momentum of the half-baked sketches up to such a pace as to feign a stroboscopic dance through the liminal space between prepubescent joy and psychotropic wonder....full text |
Tobacco lyrics
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