Dave Fridmann produced the new album from these Pittsburgh weirdos, and his imprint is clear, and welcome too. Their rough-hewn snarl has always been thrilling, but it's as if Fridmann flipped a switch and now we're hearing in Technicolor. The first truly hi-fi recording ever from this band, and while it may have taken a bit of the edge off, there is a depth and complexity that brings a whole new palette from which the group splatters paint all over the room.

Def Jam defector Jay-Z's forthcoming The Blueprint 3 is apparently meant to fly high in an Auto-Tune free zone, signaling the mechanivox trend is at last passé amongst the Africana avant-garde. No one hollered back to Pittsburgh's Black Moth Super Rainbow, though. Helmed by Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, the group's new Eating Us gets its freak on with much vocoder (and how'd we get from "Steal Your Face" to chic cannibalism so quick?). Is their muse the late great Roger Troutman or Tonto's Expanding Head Band acolyte Stevie Wonder? On the Wonderful One's recent world tour, I caught him doing an amazing voco version of "People Make the World Go Round" in L.A. Nothing much herein rises to those heights, but the first tracks are awash in fuzzy, massed sunshine, the brief, untitled closer approaches its folk-baroque beauty, and "Tooth Decay" attempts to sidle up to the Funk. Most intriguing is the banjo-spiced "American Face Dust;" don't know what it's about unless some code referring to the nanodiamonds scattered across the amber waves' surface due to impact of cosmic dust that slaughtered our mammoths, but it does sound rather like "Old Man" if Neil Young had cut it for Trans rather than Harvest. Methinks the club remixes should just feature ol' Neil and T-Pain. With these lyrics glimmering from the electro murk -- "neon lemonade, eat my face away" -- BMSR got some summer bangers for our nihilistic, re/secessionists days on their hands.

-Kandia Crazy Horse (June 4, 2009)