Tobacco's Maniac Meat

Tobacco is yet another side project of the rather large sprawling musical entity that is Black Moth Super Rainbow. But unlike that band, this project is designed to challenge, stimulate, and push around what's accepted in the Super Rainbow. Embracing the approach that no sound is to small and no experiment to great, Tobacco spit out sounds and songs as if it were disposable chaw. It's frenetic, crazy, stuff that's like listening to a mad scientist play with Radio Shack science project toys hooked up to banks of synthesizers and amplification.

Maniac Meat is the follow-up to 2006's crazy misshapen perverted rap record, F****ed Up Friends, and basically crushes everything that held that record together. Rather than picking up where he left of on that last record, Tobacco just chucks it all out the window and rebuilt Maniac Meat from the ground up. Sounding something like Air in a fight with Daft Punk at Beck's house, Maniac Meat is a slightly atonal, angular, obscure trip through the heavens. It's blissed out, fuzzed out, trippy beat driven pop at a snails pace. Think of Maniac Meat is a dirty scummy chill out record and you'll kind of have the right idea.

Tobacco uses just about everything under the sun to create the manic sounds that populate Maniac Meat and if you listen closely you can hear your kitchen sink being run through four or five midi controllers and layered on top of the sun burning out. He's created a world in which someone like Wall-E would be familiar with. It's a downtrodden, lonely world with broken electro, busted hop, and songs that trickle to an end. Atmospheric to the point where this might actually be the sound of the world ending at the hands of Windows 7 Maniac Meat is a phenomenonally strange album that takes for more strange turns then mapquest could ever hope to keep track of.

With song titles like "New Juices From the Hot Tub Freaks," "Creepy Phone Calls," and "Nuclear Waste Aerobics," it's easy to see why this isn't your standard electronic album. Maniac Meat is the definition of ramshackle...but while most would think that's a band thing, Tobacco sees it as opportunity to take junk and make something interesting out of it. This is an album of destruction and reconstruction and Maniac Meat challenges the notion of what makes pop music pop? It's a strange record that will annoy some and fascinate others and isn't that what rock and roll is all about; annoyance and entertainment? Maniac Meat is a fine second effort from a one man band who strives to confront what's acceptable and palatable...he does a darn fine job of it here and proves Tobacco to be worthy of as much attention as Black Moth Super Rainbow; disorder hasn't sounded this cool in a long, long time.