Black Moth Super Rainbow: "Twin of Myself"

Few recordings released this year have been as immediately exciting as the teaser MP3 for Eating Us. In its two and a half minutes it runs through at least half a dozen musical ideas, most of which clicked for me almost instantly. More than anything it sounded like material that could weather and perhaps even benefit from Dave Fridmann’s obnoxious, bloated production, which so frequently sours records by bands not called Sleater-Kinney.

Fridmann’s work for Black Moth Super Rainbow is at least superficially acceptable; he appears to have smoothed out their edges and turned them more than anything into a drugged-out version of Air, and it works. What doesn’t, then, is repetition: “Twin of Myself” is summarized almost entirely in its excerpt included in that teaser. An excerpt that showcased the song’s one riff and sunny synth lead as well as its one vocal melody; in the full song all of these parts repeat almost verbatim before giving way to an outro only slightly shorter than everything that precedes it.

Quite frankly, the looping nature of “Twin of Myself” does not work to its advantage. The track suffers from filler, as there’s no clear reason why its second half exists save to make sure the song breaks the three-minute mark. It would be easy to blame Dave Fridmann for this but I don’t think that’s fair; rather than total overload it’s actually a lack of material that is the track’s basic problem, and no producer can be held singularly responsible for that.