With song titles as impossibly surreal and abstract as ‘Vietcaterpillar’, ‘From The See’, ‘I Am The Alphabet’, ‘I Think It Is Beautiful That You Are 256 Colors Too’, ‘Early 70’s Gymnastics’, and ‘Folks with Magik Toes’ it’s doubtful whether we were ever going get an easy ride. And sure enough a few bleeps into ‘Raspberry Dawn’ and we’re cowering under a fizzy electric blanket of pure, buguiling noise. A far from unpleasant electro kind of noise, fair enough, but also the kind of noise you could have found anywhere from the child friendly toys in an Early Learning Centre to one of those dodgy monophonic, pitch bending Juno synthesisers your mother recently brought down from the attic.
Another electronic junk band? Well, yes. Within the threadbare, dusty confines of third album ‘Start A People’ you’ll find exactly the kind of warped and charmingly childlike paraphernalia you’ve come to expect of similarly Cult TV inspired bands like Lemon Jelly, Bent, Broadcast, Barry Sevens, and King Of Woolworths. Separating them from the above, however, is a significant and often joyful disregard for traditional structures (yes, even by the standards of these wilful mavericks). Barely venturing beyond simple loops, simple organs and soft, undulating synth sequences Black Moth Super Rainbow explore the musical equivalent of wormholes and anti-matter, turning nature upside down and reality on its head. Mad space aliens on acid rarely sounded as spaced out as this and yet the sweet, thrift store approach to recording yields a little organic treasure, as supple as a rainbow and as densely melodic as an evening spent inside an amusement arcade. In fact it’s how folk music might sound if wrung through an interstellar washing machine and left to drip dry in a field of daisies.
Sensitive, anachronistic, eerie, mind bending stuff with songs so short and so casual that they barely have time to dissapoint.