Octopus Project + Black Moth Super Rainbow The House of Apples and Eyeballs (Graveface)
It's difficult not to swell with hometown pride when discussing the Octopus Project. They're one of the few bands in our insular, self-important music discussion circles who really backs that shit up. Innovative, experimental, catchy, interesting. These guys know what to do, and they do it--consistently. Their recent collaboration with Pittsburgh's equally unclassifiable Black Moth Super Rainbow Tincan Extraordinary Salad Spinner Torrid Placement Democracy (actually just the first four words) is no exception. The House of Apples and Eyeballs is what we'd expect from these two hyper and adventurous bands: electrifying dance music whose basis is some form of weird calculus (read: a soundtrack for those who love to do math while running in place). It's a dance party for cartoon robots, complete with bleeps, buzzes and the agonizing sounds of dying machinery. As the machines distort and wail, however, the beat, obscure and buried at times, never drops. Both bands will be playing SXSW, separately and together, so oil up the joints, break out the flashcards, and throw on the leg-warmers.
The Octopus Project (MySpace)(Official)
Black Moth Super Rainbow (MySpace)(Official)
Eric Metronome You Should Be Happy (Sunken Treasure)
The music is pretty, melodic and harmonious, and it's a great backdrop for a cold day spent inside reading the paper. Warm keyboards generate enough heat to melt the tinny acoustics and banjos into velvety hot chocolate for the ears. But, perhaps unfortunately, the most descriptive or appropriate word for Eric Metronome's You Should Be Happy is inoffensive. We want to like it, and we actually do enjoy parts of each song, but it's not an album we feel like we'll crave. The lyrics are strung-together cliches, and while some lyricists can pull off that writing style (see Elliott Smith), it's difficult to buy here: "I'll choose my own battles and plan for a loss / The bridges I've already burned / they can't be rebuilt and I won't get across." There's something to be said for connecting with listeners with lyrics that seem familiar, but there's also something to be said for songwriters who opt for stagnant phrases linked together to form a chain of Boring. Apparently the Japanese love Eric Metronome, and that makes sense--if he were singing in a language we didn't know so well, we'd like him a lot more. It's a tough call--this is like saying mean things about that sincerely sweet kid with the doe eyes but who also sincerely smells kinda weird. Eric M. needs a good old shower in a stream of fresh verbiage. Then again, maybe we should just be happy--you decide if we're missing something:
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