Review Summary: Blurring the lines between sleep and death.
This album makes me want to fall asleep and never wake up again. Black Moth Super Rainbow's Falling Through a Field is an unpretentious, organic electronic album of whispered lullabies and unabashed lust for nature. All of the songs on the album are relatively short save for the closing track but this doesn't really dampen their effectiveness in anyway. Falling Through a Field is pretty lo-fi compared to the groups later efforts and, this little detail, combined with the hushed, in-your-ear vocals, drowsy bells, and trippy beats, makes for an atmosphere of cozy, lethargic bliss.
Black Moth Super Rainbow love the sun. And simplicity. While I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with complexity, Falling Through a Field shows beautifully that less can relay so much more if executed properly. I get a singular vision when I listen to this album. I see, I hear, I really feel a lusciously warm field on a sunny late summer afternoon, grass being tickled by sweet, innocent breeze bending itself into a bed for the vocalist to dissolve into in his tired euphoria.
One of the standouts on this album is the half-asleep lullaby “I Think it's Beautiful That You Are 256 Colors Too,” especially when Tobacco whispers “I'll just stand on the meadow/I'll be taken by sunbeams.” He isn't longing; he isn't hoping. I hear simple realization and embrace of what is, and what is happens to be dripping golden sensory overload in an unnamed field.
Another pleasure is the trippy funeral dirge/lullaby of “Dandelion Graves.” Glowing with a pleasant organ and vocals more whispery than ever, this song liberates death from its usual dusty home of cryptic gloom by laying it down softly and sweetly in a baby's crib. In a way I feel this song is saying, at least to me, that when people die, we miss them, we'd like to think they'd miss us if they could, but the whole process is accepted, appreciated, and relegated its own little token of beauty all without resistance.
I'm not going to review every track, but I want to mention my final favorite from the album and that's “Falling Through a Field.” Whispering about his coffin made of dandelions and how he will essentially rot into the earth (fall through a field sounds more romantic) for “ever and ever,” the vocalist seems to be quite okay with all of this, and why shouldn't he be? Really, perspective is almost everything, as this album proves. And Black Moth Super Rainbow manages to carve out a soothing, utterly refreshing, deceptively child-like story perfect just before bedtime, regardless of whether that bedtime is permanent or not.
If you aren't familiar with this offering from Black Moth Super Rainbow, find it, get nice and sleepy, lie down, put it on, and allow yourself to be lulled into sluggish dream fields while honest, innocent whispers crawl up inside your ears and put you to sleep.
