Surprising Tobacco

I should start out by saying that Tobacco, the band I went to see on Saturday night, are excellent performers and put on a hypnotic, impressive, and memorable show, because after my review of the opening band, I'm going to seem like a sour puss. Few things are more frustrating for a music lover than a miserable opening band, because it makes the wait for the good band that much more painful and long. Junk Culture, project of Oxford, MS native Deepak Mantena is a primarily sample-based music ("cosmic R&'B" according to his MySpace), of which I am generally in favor.

However, Junk Culture sounds like the worst imaginable combination of Vampire Weekend and newer Animal Collective. Each sample is too simple and too brief to be at all mesmerizing. There's almost no depth, and songs barely change at all over the course of three or four minutes, like The Field but with no sense of development. On top of that, Mantena uses his voice to howl painfully, yelp out of key, or scream the same line or even the same word over and over. These "singing styles" may be his way of keeping energy up during live shows, but everything he did with his mouth was a total failure, including between-song banter. He tried to lead the audience in the chorus of LFO's hit "Summer Girls" to introduce one of their songs as his idea of a send-up to primary LFO songwriter Rich Cronin, who died last week. Later, he lip-synced an entire verse and chorus of "Party in the USA" to introduce another song, a totally unnecessary and abrasive move. His best song was his least offensive, a quietly sparkling and, again, barely changing little bit that was a breath of fresh air only by comparison. The drumming was the one redeeming quality of the music, but since everything else was so abysmal, it was hard to pay attention to that. Avoid Junk Culture.

Tobacco surprised me. I expected something like his set at Bonnaroo last summer: a guy playing a couple of keyboards at the same time with weird video projections. Since then, though, the music has gotten more complex, and the videos have gotten weirder. Tobacco, aka Tom Fec, and former Black Moth Super Rainbow band member Maux Boyle opened with a darker, more melodically complex song than much of the album material, while displaying on the screen behind them censored pornography with dinosaurs in the foreground. Fec did say in my interview that he picked videos based on whatever looked the most awkward and out of place.

Recent album Maniac Meat is more of the same fuzzy instrumental hip-hop, but Fec and Boyle revamped songs beautifully live. Fec tweaked the synths of "Fresh Hex" so they would stutter almost Aphex Twin-style, while a large black man in a shirt that read FAT BOY danced on the screen behind him. "Sweatmother" was even more distorted, drenched in whirlwind synths and harsher, which had been the edge I hoped Maniac Meat would have as a whole &- clearly the live setting is where these songs take on life of their own. "Side 8 (Big Gums Version)," a highlight from first album F---ed up Friends, found Fec scrambling the beat more, adding reverb and echo and occasionally drowning out the buzzing arpeggiated synth. In his efforts to find as incongruous video footage as possible, Fec slipped in a few particularly weird selections that, surprisingly, matched up with the music, such as "Lick the Witch" and a Japanese man in a white mask wobbling and doing what looked like sign language while dancing and keeping the beat. It also became clear around then that whirring vacuum synths were actually heavily affected slide guitar, adding to the disorienting effect of the show &- few of the sounds are what they seem, and the pieces fit together in unexpected ways. "Hairy Candy" was matched up with a gymnastics routine (Tobacco seems to have a fascination with 70s gymnastic videos) and had layers of catchy melodies.

The show's first highlight came with "Backwoods Altar," a spooky, regal-sounding cut that fits its name, as Fec broke out an omnichord, a sort of electronic autoharp, to play a beautiful quickly-"picked" bridge that countered the slight abrasiveness of the rest of the synths perfectly, while the beats seemed to drip from heavy manipulation. A bassist and drummer then joined Fec and Boyle on stage to inject new life into Maniac Meat tracks "Constellation Dirtbike Head" and "Heavy Makeup." The former's quick pace benefited from the live drums, and Boyle's bridge of astral synth matched the energy of the cymbal crashes; the latter featured synths stabbing through sludgy bass sound.

Surprisingly, the encore, another non-album track, was the low point of the set, with little development and a noisy outro, but after such a stunning set of killer beats and infectious synths, it's forgivable. Tobacco's music and live set will surely only improve from here, especially if he continues to experiment with his already ground-breaking sounds when playing live, but he really needs to find better openers.