Pittsburgh-area experimental artist TOBACCO (a member of Black Moth Super Rainbow) emerges from the moldy robot cave in which he’s been dwelling since 2016 with two singles in advance of his upcoming release, Hot Wet & Sassy.
“Centaur Skin” features an insistent, distorted bass line, arpeggiated with inhuman precision (a la Daft Punk), that skips along like an expertly thrown rock over a murky swamp. Washes of degraded, just-uncovered-from-your-grandma’s-attic synth and glassy keyboard hover overtop, while TOBACCO, his voice vocoded to ghoulish effect, saunters around like an acid-fried Kavinsky and delivers some honest-to-goodness pop hooks (peep the descending melody on the recurring “Only, only, only, only, one” and tell me that you can’t imagine it on a Weeknd album). “Centaur Skin” refines TOBACCO’s robo-freakery into a streamlined pop format, and the result is glorious.
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