Tobacco
Maniac
Meat (Anticon)
If the details seem scarce, it’s because
that’s how Tobacco likes to keep them. Hailing from
an unspecified burg in rural Pennsylvania, somewhere north
of Pittsburgh, he has successfully made a name for himself
even as he’s avoided acknowledging that name’s
legal counterpart. As both the frontman of Black Moth Super
Rainbow and the sole creative engine behind Tobacco, he’s
earned the eager ears and prying eyes of doggedly loyal fans
and smitten critics alike – a kindness he’s repaid
by granting few interviews, obscuring his face in photos,
and seeming wholly uninterested in the subject of his own
identity. Such things just get in the way of the music after
all, so if it’s easier, you might think of Tobacco as
music – a one-man genre made of equal parts analog crunch,
earthy psychedelia, fuzzed-up hip-hop, and outside pop. All
the same, here’s what’s known.
Tobacco has a sister. He grew up in a decent
neighborhood. He was nearly strong-armed into elementary school
band after an aptitude test suggested he play an instrument.
He hated the idea, so he didn’t do it. He didn’t
like music at all, in fact, until he discovered MTV –
and hence, the Beasties’ “So What’cha Want”
video – one long summer bridging the middle of middle
school. The first concert he attended was Butthole Surfers,
and it’s still his favorite. His favorite record of
all time is Beck’s Mellow Gold. Sticking to
his childhood guns, he typically doesn’t like music
released earlier than the late ’80s.
As for high school, Tobacco could have done
without the classes. An extracurricular interest in freestyle
BMX – flatland – was soon replaced by a growing
zeal for music, even though his first band, called Wood, didn’t
employ any instruments to its cause. (Its two main ingredients
were flyers and hype.) Acquiring a guitar and a four-track
opened up new doors, to the purplish noise and busted ghetto-blaster
tracks that now populate The Allegheny White Fish Tapes,
which Tobacco self-released in 2009.
This was before the gritty analog synths, the
murky vocoder-ing, and the hypnotic aural crush that came
with founding Black Moth Super Rainbow. Tobacco rounded up
the group’s members before graduation, and until last
year’s Dave Fridmann-produced collaborative affair,
Eating Us, roughly treated BMSR as a solo project,
penning three albums’ and several EPs’ worth of
sludgy pagan pop for his cohorts to realize live. He designed
BMSR’s album art as well, which occasionally involved
scratch-n-sniff elements or hair.
But Tobacco would come to crave a more pure
musical identity, one steeped in guttural sounds that hit
harder and flashed brighter. This fixation reared its ugly
head as 2008’s beat-oriented Fucked Up Friends,
Tobacco’s official debut. Two years later, with BMSR
effectively on hiatus, the man is back and beastlier than
ever with Maniac Meat, a record designed to bully
his previous works into a corner, gut them, and leave ’em
for dead. This is a good time to mention that Tobacco believes
he is making pop music.
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