Surprise, it's an album review! not expecting that, were you? From the murks of the Bucolic Tundra...

Well, making compilations sure is fun. You do it for other people, you do it for yourself, it's all great.
And this stays true to the original goal of this website: make people who care maybe discover music that they'll like as much I did. 
However, thinking about this like I do about many other futile things (i.e. way to much) as I was writing this made me think of two inherent flaws to mixes: first of all, they take the song completely out of its context (an album), and second (possibly a consequence of the first), they induce a sort of musical A.D.D. that can be fun but maybe ends up being exhausting and not always very satisfying (I've always found it worth it to get an entire album rather than download "that one track you like on the radio" off the internet). 
Of course, my other option, album reviews, have their own flaws, but I do enjoy writing them as much as I appreciate reading other people's. Hence, after SEVEN mixes in almost 2 months, here is an album review. Hopefully, we'll be able to better balance the blog in the future. 

And remember to buy the music you like (but only that one).

Tobacco

Maniac Meat

Anticon, 25th May 2010

This stuff blew my mind. What I don't understand is how critics seem to appreciate this album and give it almost good reviews but never really find it that great. Well, whatever.

Lets start with a little story. Tom Fec , also known as (A.K.A A.K.A.) Tobacco, is Black Moth Super Rainbow's (apparently) main evil genius (also from BMSR, check out the Seven Fields Of Aphelion, a synth lady picking the bucolic almost soothing ambient road out of paranoid pop). If you listen to BMSR (and I recommend you do try), you'll recognize him as the  author of the  beautifully creepy trademark vocodized vocals you can hear on number of tracks. The Fec is thought to live somewhere in Pennsylvannia, where he roams the forest of Penn wearing nothing but underwear, pulling a chariot containing his recording studio and a generator, until he finds a suitable spot to enter a hiphop beat trance and compose his music (the last sentense is mildly offensive lie, apologies to the concerned).

Without any more confusing attempts at joking, this album has many particularities that give it personality. First of all, its cover. I'm still not sure if I think it's awesome or it's just ugly (both?), but it sure is strange borderline creepy: hair? chicken? muscles?

Second, titles: Maniac Meat? Constellation Dirtbike Head (track 1)? New Juices From the Hot Tub Freaks (track 10)? Nuclear Waste Aerobics (track 16)? I usually think great names are very good indicator of great music, and Maniac Meat sure does follow that rule.

Because behind all the crazy visuals, the inventive horror of the names and really just Tobacco's pure wackiness, there is an album of varied, percussive, original and more-than-well-thought sonic collages that form the third and most important aspect of Tobacco's work. I'll call Maniac Meat a collage because it builds its songs like... well... a collage.  As represented by the following poorly designed visual: 

The occasional vocodized vocal Tobacco came up with for BMSR's albums. Creepy, evocative, lovable

(in this album, Beck provides weird vocals for a couple of wonderful tracks)

 ---------

 one or more of the following: dreamy/harsh/chopped up synth melodies. Those will melt through your skull right into your brain

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Funky as hell, thick, heavy but sparse yet trance-inducing bass lines

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Gnarly, Fucked Up Awesome Harsh Hip Hop Beat, like if Run DMC's rhythm tracks were made by a zombie Galifianakis purposefully taking the blue acid to have bad trips and taking ecsatsy to fix the problem

detail: -------- means that the element over is added on top of the element under

A thought that came to my mind while listening to this record (over and over again) was that Tobacco might have followed the following method: take a bunch of beats from the 80's, complete with questionable amounts of reverb and an uncomfortable tendency to be used for disco tracks, and make something interesting out of them. I'm quite glad he's found enough to make 16 tracks.

One of the reviews for Tobacco's previous LP, Fucked Up Friends, said that it was the stoner album of the year, except traditional guitars had been replaced by drum machines, loops, synths and effects. This is even more so for Maniac Meat. Psychedelic is one of the first words to come to mind when listening to this album, which makes great use of harsh sounds, heavy driving rhythms, and spaced out vocals/synths. Here is another feat from Tobacco: being able to make a maniac psychedelic record, with an edge about as sharp as Hawkwind's Space Ritual, with which it shares a tendency for bliss through sonic agressivity and being, as uncle Barney says it so well, Awesome.

To me, it's one of the best electronica records in a very long time, up there with Boards of Canada's Campfire Headphase. In fact, one could almost argue that Maniac Meat is Headphase's evil nemesis. Both psychedelic in their own right, Board Of Canada's record is soothing, resting, with a weird sense of calm depth to it, and, as Bibio says, an underlying mystery - like a place in the country (...) with barely any humans but a breathtaking view. Maybe a glacier or two, and definitely no clouds. On the other side, Tobacco went all out with his appreciation of beats and harsh but melodic electronica, taking BMSR's unsettling/uncomfortable pop magic to a new extreme. Like being trapped in the darkest jungle, unable to stop running, barely able to disctinct shadows of creatures making the strangest sound you've heard yet. And I like that.


I hope you do to!

" hmmmm..."

http://www.myspace.com/tobacco

JNCT

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