Video: Tobacco – “Grape Aerosmith feat. Beck”


After seeing some other examples of Tobacco’s music video output, I don’t think we should expect anything less than a free form, sensory overload freak out. Suffice to say, his new video for “Grape Aerosmith” off his 2010 releaseManiac Meat is inching closer, and I mean inching, to something resembling a linear narrative.  Forsaking the old VHS mash-up style of his most referenced video “Hawker Boat,” Mr. Fec decides to give us a glimpse (maybe more of a screen capture of a dream) of a working stiff going off the deep in ways Kafka would be hard pressed to imagine.  Flaming meat wads be damned.

Tobacco – “Maniac Meat” Album Review

Tom Fec, a.k.a Tobacco, is from Pittsburgh but he isn’t from Pittsburgh.  The 98′ Hampton High School grad isolates himself so significantly from any tangible sense of location that it’s hard to slap a Steel City label on his music.  His MySpace page formerly stated he was from “Rural Western PA/Vietnam.” Granted that is one absurd detail of many surrounding the enigmatic driving force behind Black Moth Super Rainbow (a band that revels in high degrees of anonymity)  but I can’t help embellishing this fact to explain the man’s entire creative persona: a maniacal solopsist, celebrating non-sequiturs with quixotic delight, determined to stretch his few remaining ties to reality well beyond their breaking point.

And with his May 25th release Maniac Meat, Tobacco deliriously pulls you down the rabbit hole even further, brashly slamming psychedelic electronic pyrotechnics into hard block, hip-hop beats and towering guitar wails, all the while making his 2008 release Fucked Up Friends look downright minimalist in comparison. Continue reading

Speed Trials : A Pittsburgh Track Review 2.0 (pt. 2)

hedgerow3Speed of the Pittsburgh Sound welcomes you to the second half of the second edition of Speed Trials.  This time around, we aim to bring you all those beat makers and rhymesayers that call the steel city home.  As I have mentioned before, Pittsburgh is lucky to be spoiled with more visionary laptop-DJ’s (Tobacco, Power Pill Fist, Discuss), tastemaking sample-smiths (the illustrious Girl Talk, Skymall) and wit stealing mc’s (Wiz Khalifa, Grand Buffet, Bloodmoney, Boaz) than most cities can ever dream of.  Scaling the review down to only four tracks from such a deep talent pool was no easy task.

In addition to all this home grown talent, spots like The New Amsterdam and Shadow Lounge continue to bring some seriously challenging hip-hop into the Pittsburgh scene. Some upcoming shows include Wale (pronounced Wall-ay) at The Shadow Lounge on May 22 and Vast Aire of Cannibal Ox at the Thunderbird Cafe on June 13.  Now that we have established the steel city can bring that boom boom boom as good as any other scene in America, onto the tracks.  Continue reading

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