Rad Cult (label)
04 May 2018 (released)
04 May 2018
Almost certainly not named after the mad rush-dash to the garage on Mother’s Day, 'Panic Blooms' is 16 tracks of devilish dub-stepping and a treatise on the parlous state of (dis)united nations. All’s unwell in Shangri La-La- Land.
Like avenging angels cast aside from purgatory’s limbo, Black Moth Super Rainbow, with mysterious masked figurehead Tobacco, return after a six-year absence with their sixth album that encompasses the warped and weird, ominous and luminous. Brandishing the last rites of humankind’s passage and reading the riot act to the malevolent, it paints a hyperreal surreal vision of Boschian levels. Hell is for other people, heaven can wait.
You can tell the tone of what to expect from the song titles, with language such as ‘void’, ‘bottomless’ and ‘curses’ this is no laughing matter, more a trip down the River Nihilism.
Using the vocoder as distorter of diction, TOBACCO’S voice is a mangled robo-preaching to the perverted, musically augmented by skewed and skittish beats and sounds. Like fellow avant guardians The Legendary Pink Dots (led by the equally enigmatic Edward ka-Spel) these rhythms are a mystery of man and machine.
The think and you’ll miss it ‘One more ear’ is an aural echo from a future that’s passed. Folkish Wicca picking creates a haunting pagan ritual of no return.
There’s a Beatles-sheen to ‘New Breeze’: the pop desperate to burst out, with demon harmonising yet constrained by unsettling orchestration, like reciting a page from the book of Revelation No.9. ‘Bottomless Face’ reimagines Spielbergs’s alien communications, but splices it with Ann Peebles’s ‘I can’t stand the rain’ creating a Close Encounters of the word(less) kind.
There’s a void to avoid on ‘Permanent Hole’ which has the line ‘Something tells me this is not going to be your day’: a fate accompanied self-fulfilling prophecy, as fluttering electronics litter pre-destiny’s child.
This baroque opera will leave the listener in no doubt of Earth Corps. Ltd. PLC’s current predicament and that’s a Bach/Handel compliment.
