Black Moth Super Rainbow – now two decades into their candied up career – emerges from the technicolor pollen puckered Pennsylvania landscape with a new and reformulated fructose-blasted seventh album. Soft New Magic Dream is here and with it comes that familiar rush of flavors that pump directly from the BMSR soda fountain; that signature blend of strange neon nostalgia, sweetly melancholic synth pop wizardry, hip hop head bobbing, and citric acid tinged freak out flourish. It’s been seven years since the more sinister Panic Blooms, and in that time plenty has happened in the house of Rad Cult, but with Soft New Magic Dream, we are invited to bask in the analog sweet and sour embrace of that classic and here notably chilled out and snoozled up BMSR sensibility.

Soft New Magic Dream has a nuanced flavor profile; these are freaky love songs, they funk up crunchy and rattle the speakers here and there, they melt down gelatinous at the right temperatures, and even go full ballad in a few extra-soft spots. The album balances sugar kinked romance with their distinctive and here notably downtempo funky production. Never fully eschewing BMSR’s signature strange liquid centers, these songs still flirt with the uncanny while honing in on the deeply melodic and approachably groovy tendencies they’ve have been exploring in their twenty years of lid flipping. Soaring synth leads ribbon through taffy colored chord changes and highly tactile and fractured drum programming and breaks. Tobacco’s classic vocoder vocals, puckish as ever, burble fawning tenderness and body horror quasi erotic double dares in the fizzy saturated mist. These gummy serenades will leave you blissed out with a cavity-crumbled ear to ear grin.

As the BMSR project has evolved, from the scuzzier and folk-tinged backwoods leaf worship of the first albums into the more anthemic roller disco fog machine scenes of their mid-career, and then darker turns in the last few recent albums, Soft New Magic Dream feels like another subtle and surprisingly tender twist on that now-classic sound you’ve come to expect from BMSR. A turn towards something more serene, more direct, playfully wooing us without totally ditching that enigmatic crooked smile. Lose your toothbrush in the clouds and get ready to guzzle down this potent marshmallow cloudscape concoction optimized for falling into face first.

Ricky Eat Acid is the solo project of Sam Ray. Originally from Baltimore, now living in Orlando.

Often described as bizarre and unlistenable, AITIS band effortlessly knocks out brilliant & intuitive pop jams best experienced with sound proofing headphones and a tight blindfold.
(like Samhain but quiet)