SeeFu Lilac is the latest offering from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania’s princes of demented synth funk, Black Moth Super Rainbow. After a three year gap between albums filled with a string of releases by the group’s frontman “Tobacco,” BMSR has once again created the middle portion of the venn diagram between beautiful and fucking weird. 

SeeFu Lilac is half vocoder heavy trip-hop anthems, half Lynchian lullabies that got lost in a vortex in between the couch cushions. In fact, I would be surprised if the songs “Warm Water Leviathan” and “Unfinished Sketch 7: Radiation Society” didn’t show up in the next David Lynch film. 

The album starts off with the title track, an accordion and guitar duet seemingly performed in an attic in 1959 as the musicians watch the Memorial Day parade through a tiny window. The channel immediately changes as “The Chew” begins. It’s a classic Black Moth ballad meeting their usual requirements of feeling like you’re watching alien pornography on a couple different benzodiazepines. “Since You’ve Seen Her” is the album’s standout track – it’s as if the aliens are recreating The Godfather as a porn flick and there isn’t enough valium in the world to feel normal. 

“Umbros Vorhees,” track six on this album, and according to a 0.23 second Google search, two words that the band just completely made up (and doesn’t spell anything backwards, don’t worry I checked) – could just be samples from one of the original GameBoys. “DVD Sweetener” (a dark simile for Special Features perhaps?) is only 1:37 long, and works great in combination with the repeat button. 

SeeFu Lilac fails to please only in the sense that it ends before it really gets going. My advice is just to listen to it again. 

- Mischa Decter

Published in Volume 70, Number 14 of The Uniter (January 7, 2016)