Tobacco
Maniac Meat
The 14-odd years of Pittsburgh native Tom Fec’s singular music career have taken more twists and turns than a used condom floating down the Allegheny River. Starting (appropriately enough) as Allegheny White Fish, he crafted a lo-fi brand of angular noise-rock before morphing into satanstompingcaterpillars, featuring Boards of Canada-esque analog austerity, haunting melodies and electronically altered vocals.
In 2003, he transformed yet again, starting the now-well-known Black Moth Super Rainbow. Adopting the moniker of Tobacco, Fec used the band to push his music in a more muscular direction, jammed full of bleating, buzzy synths, vintage Novatron flute samples and an increasingly refined vocoder vocal delivery. Albums like Dandelion Gum and Eating Us showcased the band’s new sound nicely, and it was between the recording of these that Fec released the first proper Tobacco record, Fucked Up Friends. This solo outing replaced that group’s pastoral haze with tauter instrumentation, boom-bap drum machines and a deep sense of creeping menace.
With the release of Tobacco’s latest, Maniac Meat, it’s clear that this paranoid new direction marks a definitive turn in Fec’s musical evolution. It’s a mangled masterpiece where degraded bass lines and drum loops hold sway, tunes careen wildly between major and minor keys, and every note seems coated with a sickly translucent goo.
Perhaps the best example of this is the song “Heavy Makeup,” pairing a snarling bass-and-drum groove with vocals that start off sounding surprisingly natural, before dissolving into a pool of distortion. The oft-repeated lyric sums the mood up nicely: “You got sick from a lolli-lolli-lollipop / You feel free when you’re killing me.”
Meanwhile, tracks like “Lick the Witch” and “Unholy Demon Rhythms” drop some serious head-nodding beats on the proceedings, bringing the sticky tunefulness down to earth with old-school hip-hop flair. Indeed, despite the vague sense of nausea that is Tobacco’s stock in trade, he even manages to sneak in a couple of undeniably gorgeous melodies in the form of “Stretch Your Face” and “Six Royal Vipers.”
And as if that weren’t enough, he also recruits the legendary Beck Hansen to lend his voice to a couple of tracks, including the stunning (and disappointingly short) “Fresh Hex.” I’d even go so far as to say that this is the best Beck has sounded in years—perhaps a full-length collaboration is in order?
At any rate, with Maniac Meat, Tobacco has fully hit his stride as a solo artist, further honing his unique sound and ushering in a newfound confidence and consistency. Fec has long dissuaded critics from referring to the Tobacco albums as “side projects,” insisting that this is now his main concern, and there’s no question that Maniac Meat is bringing his music into a whole a new realm. Sure, it’s a realm filled with grinning psychopaths, disturbing '80s aerobics videotapes and candy apples filled with razor blades—but, you know, in a good way.
