Live: Black Moth Super Rainbow at South Street Seaport

Black Moth Super Rainbow
South Street Seaport
Friday, July 24

If your frontman insists on sitting cross-legged on the floor onstage, singing into a vocoder and essentially hidden from view behind the monitors, it only makes sense to hire a dude to wear a Sasquatch suit (complete with disquieting Thom Yorke/Ed Grimley/Jesus mask) and dance around in the photo pit, triumphantly brandish an Axis and Allies box, swipe a broom from a custodian to sweep up a bit, pretend to sing into an unplugged mic, and generally distract the photographers specifically and the South Street Seaport denizens generally from, you know, the band. Black Moth Super Rainbow are awfully shy, it seems, which explains why the drummer is wearing a ski mask. It's Friday night, it's free, what the hell.

BMSR's new Eating Us is actually a pretty good spaced-out electro-rock record, produced by Dave Fridmann, which is immediately obvious: enormous Flaming Lips drums, drugged up/out MGMT psych-pop melodies, a general Mercury Rev haze. Every shred of vocals (frontman = Tobacco) is buffed to a bloodless, robotic shine, which grates both live and on record, though the former offers more distractions in the form of Sasquatch Man and a trippy, only occasionally R-rated video loop it's a lot easier to discern the details of once the sun goes down. These guys seem to be exactly as culturally prominent as they want to be, big enough to headline a River to River fete, disinterested enough to allow themselves to be upstaged by a dude in a bear suit.

Walking back, this happened. I will never do that again.