Planet Notion - Jagged Electro / Trippy Beats

Tobacco’s debut album, Fucked Up Friends, has been available in the states since 2008 and will be dropping onto UK shores in July. For those unaware (which included yours truly until the CD dropped through my letterbox), Tobacco is the pseudonym of Tom Fec, a Pennsylvanian best known as the frontman of Black Moth Super Rainbow. Trippy, beat-skipping electro and sketchy psychedelic tendencies are the way with the band, so you’d be forgiven for thinking Tobacco’s solo project would offer much the same. In some respects it does; in other respects it highlights an attempt to disassociate himself from prior projects, beats leading the way ahead of any lyrical journey.

As that rare breed of modern music enthusiast who finds electronic music as appealing as shit fetishism, I was thinking I’d give Fucked Up Friends a big Fuck You. Somewhat surprisingly, I quite enjoyed it. Maybe it’s because tracks like opener, ‘Street Trash’, with their edgy beats and electronic ebbs and flows and highs and lows, were on a par with the frazzled post-weekend brain-trauma I was experiencing. It’s freaky electronic music, music for the weak and vulnerable of mind. Psychedelic electro? Maybe. Tobacco certainly seems to fill a void between the trippy side of musical exploration and music currently leading the way for the alternative, night-dwelling younger audience.

‘Hawker Boat’ features a lo-fi sound like the opening to a kids’ TV show, broken only by head-nod, drum-beat solos and the occasional pipe melody over-lay; a pleasant rest-bite from head-fuck tracks to follow. ‘Gross Magik’ is one of the few tracks featuring vocals and ‘Tape Eater’ is reminiscent of pill-popped eyeballs being stretched-out with a pitch-fork; your mind crashing from a high peak to the fiery gates below.

Other tracks are a tad lighter on your subconscious, including ‘Yum Yum Cult’, which highlights Tobaccos clever use of overdubbed acoustics and drums, creating a more dance-oriented feel to your standard instrumental track whilst keeping in synch with the rest of the album. ‘Dirt’ is the most hip-hop track on Fucked Up Friends, with vocals courtesy of Aesop Rock and mind-bendingly remixed vocals helping to spin the basic beat into a perfect stoner haze. All in all, Fucked Up Friends is a pretty Fucked Up album, which deserves a place in any section of a record collection labelled COMING UP or COMING DOWN.

Fucked Up Friends is out on Anticon Records, July 6th.