Oscar Wilde knew it, Roald Dahl knew it, and Black Moth Super Rainbow know it, too: the most fucked-up stories are fairy tales. In the grainy video for “All 2 of Us,” the woozy lead single of Soft New Magic Dream, grotesque clowns gnaw on hamburgers with their mouths open, salivate over human flesh, and bare their fangs with sadistic, slack-jawed glee. It’s R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour meets Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, a psych-pop lullaby set against a psychological thriller. In the insular world of BMSR, is it necessarily new? For two decades and counting, the Pittsburgh band has churned out synthy dreamscapes with a dreadful edge, music for the moment a weed brownie makes you nauseous. At the band’s online shop, you can purchase a vinyl record, or, if you like, a shrunken head preserved in eternal anguish. If this new album is an attempt, in the words of its first song, to “Open the Fucking Fantasy,” the desire seems misplaced—the fantasy has been open, and unchanging, since 2003. Is it still magic or just muscle memory?
On their first album in seven years, there is evidence for both: some moments that surprise, and others that make the fantasy feel formulaic. Black Moth Super Rainbow’s sound remains distinctly their own, which is impressive considering the referential era they outlived. In the mid-2000s, when they released their earliest and most enduring work, hypnagogic pop was in vogue, as was hauntology—home-recorded soundtracks for half-remembered dreams. What BMSR did differently than, say, John Maus and James Ferraro, was pinpoint not the depressive downfall, but the even-eerier period when everything feels too okay. Their best songs were deceptively wistful, mourning someone who wasn’t there, something that hadn’t happened yet. On the new album, though, this funhouse-meets-funeral concept more often feels rehearsed—a mysterious band demystified by its own increasingly unmysterious vibe.
That the mystery still hits, even if only sometimes, is a testament to how strong the BMSR spell can be. While Soft New Magic Dream largely re-hashes the Black Moth Super Rainbow formula, it also occasionally manages to find new colors in old constraints—not abandoning their schtick, but not copy-pasting it either. In the slinky music breaks of “Unknown Potion,” you might make out traces of “Smile the Day After Today,” a sparse instrumental standout from 2009’s Eating Us. Self-parody? No. A step forward? Also no: It’s the sound of a band whose longevity has left it standing in its own shadow. This feels particularly grating on tracks that go on for a little too long, like the otherwise-solid “Open the Fucking Fantasy.” By the third chorus—and for much of the LP—the magic carpet is indeed revved up. It would be nice if we went somewhere.
Black Moth Super Rainbow are led by Tobacco, a semi-anonymous vocoder enthusiast with creepy-crawly music of his own. In some ways, BMSR represent an extension of his warped universe: same gooey typeface, same friendly-monster vocals, same sickly-sweet fever dream. For better or worse, his fingerprints are everywhere on Soft New Magic Dream. “Tastebud” is the strongest non-single here, in part because of its uncomfortable pauses—a trick that gave Hot Wet & Sassy its tense, impending-doom textures. It’s a rare moment that sounds like Black Moth Super Rainbow produced by Tobacco the eclectic artist, rather than Tobacco the eclectic artist putting away his MPC to stand behind a microphone. More often, we get less-exciting moments like “Demon’s Glue,” a five-minute song that plateaus in BMSR’s candy-colored comfort zone by minute two. Black Moth Super Rainbow are masters of their insular, very specific, Nyan Cat-adjacent musical world. More and more, it’s beginning to feel like Neverland: a place where no one ever grows up, but nothing ever changes.
