Black Moth Super Rainbow + The Octopus Project "All the Friends You Can Eat"

These two bands fit together as well as a two-necked guitar in the hands of a noseless, three-eyed nun, if you know what I'm getting at. Both Black Moth Super Rainbow and The Octopus Project work within generic boundaries only really defined by how far its practioners push them, and The House of Apples and Eyeballs dips into quite a lot of territory over the course of a scant 36 minutes, mostly to very rewarding ends. There are certainly elements of post-rock and prog present, but there's also a self-conscious sheen of lo-fi electro-scuzz amateurism here, with the de-tuned keyboards and seemingly random start-stop points for songs. Certain songs ("Spiracle") suggest a more accessible Excepter (tongue twister alert), while others channel a liveish Boards of Canada ("Runite Castles," "Lemon Lime Face") and still others ("Tony Face") betray a desire to get Richard James in the studio for the next collaboration. But "All the Friends You Can Eat" (mp3) is easily the best and most memorable song on the record. Opening with a sour mellotron loop over a hissy 808-sound, it's momentarily controlled by a spazzy, overdriven keyboard, and then another variation on the nasal synth. Then the drums, as they only should, take the wheel and drive the song off-road in a hail of overlapping crashes and snare smacks. Ahhhh, and then it just stops and dies.

Buy The House of Apples and Eyeballs from BMSR here. Octopus Project's site is here.

ELSEWHIRR: Man, I remember those halcyon days of the mid/late Nineties, when the Onion's AV Club was one of my primary sources for well-crafted, non-numerical music reviews. I just caught a link to their '06 Top 25 (bam), and geez. Midlake at #3? Jenny Lewis? The effing Dears? Cold War Kids? Mother-scratching Rhymefest? No individual lists? I haven't read the regular Onion now for a few years. Is it just as bad? (I know I'm way behind the times on this, but misplaced nostalgia always brings out the worst in me.)