TOBACCO - Hot Wet & Sassy

October 30, 2020 - Ghostly International

TOBACCO partners with Trent Reznor to elaborate on his signature gross-out-electro-shoe-gaze-grunge-core-yada-yada sound. Hot Wet & Sassy has a handful of successes, which stray far enough away from their “sound” to demonstrate their musicality. However, the better half of the album is less than stand-out.

Centaur skin paints an intimate image of fantasy and 80s electro-adventure. Airy vocals lend themselves to understated melodies which volley between instruments. One moment the lead is Tobacco the man, the next it’s Tobacco the pipe organ or the glockenspiel. As always, the high distortion of voice lends mystery and intrigue. Clever pauses build longing, and repetition delivers.

‘Pit’ is as difficult to get out of, but more desirable to be in than most pits. Climbing synths tickle the ear and bad-boy bass-growls entice the wild side.

‘Headless to Headless’ and ‘Stabbed by a Knight’ carry on. Texturally guttural, H2H is a wasteland to thrive in, high-fantasy parodied with necro-pastoral sensibilities. These have the impact of transition songs. But by the time ‘Chinese Aquarius’ rolls around, the unfortunate truth becomes apparent. These aren’t transitions. The songs that stand out are hiccups.

Aggressively goth bedrock and dreamboat synth come together. Dissonance let’s a draft into the stuffy plane of scrapbook collage. “Poisonous Horses,” is a slow plucky pitch-up then pitch-down whatever interlude, that serves to stop the momentum rather than tie multiple forces together. Which makes sense. How far will a poisonous horse take its rider and what’s the price of the journey.

It’s not easy to say why, nor can I make a convincing case for it, but the synth lines of Hot Wet & Sassy suggest, to me, that it’s an album of approximated or amputated cover-songs. Maybe it’s the highly self-aware manner in which TOBACCO turns the classic electro ‘Push It,’ into “turn this shit off.” But little haunts of almost unplaceable other songs weave throughout Hot Wet & Sassy. Most troubling is the unverifiable bop-instrument in ‘Babysitter’ that imitates the nuanced flow of Tierra Whack’s ‘Unemployed’ chorus.

As always, or often, TOBACCO is compositionally interesting, leaning on the collision of disparate forces to create something strange, inviting, and sustainable. It’s an album of several successes. ‘Body Double’ among them, self-effacing, boosted, and re-inventive. It Frankenstein’s an old earworm to create a new earworm. ⛰️