July 2, 2009

Album Review: Tobacco - 'Fucked Up Friends'

Smoke gets in your brain, weirdly

8 / 10 Proffering a kind of musical Venn diagram with his ace debut, Pennsylvania’s Tobacco lopes amiably into the space left by inactive Gallic pop modernists Air. Only Tom Fec (also of widdly psych-pop heads Black Moth Super Rainbow) arrives with a backpack and baggy jeans (read: thudding hip-hop beats), flutey, pastoral prog and enough Moog, Mellotron and Stylophone oscillations to give any analogue fetishist a stiffy – as well as a sense of justification for Tonto’s Expanding Head Band who were doing this sort of thing in the early ’70s. But if the parts of his sum are old school, Tobacco’s answer is a heady, sticky, groovesome brew of sun-warped instrumental pop with one fantastic, linguist-challenging burst from Aesop Rock (‘Dirt’).

Chris Parkin

Click here to get your copy of Tobacco's 'Fucked Up Friends' from the Rough Trade shop