TOBACCO - Sweatbox Dynasty (2016)

It's been almost two decades since baby TOBACCO first plugged in a tape deck, popped the top, and found the dark magic that's fuelled so many sonic forays into his genre-less bog of beat-blasted hypnagogia and otherworldly yet earthen pop. The Pennsylvanian experimentalist has since helmed countless Black Moth Super Rainbow releases, remixed outsiders as offbeat as HEALTH and unexpected as White Zombie, and produced for MCs ranging from Aesop Rock to Beck. But it's on his fourth solo album that TOBACCO winds up coining an apt name for his vast empire of mouldering electrified dirt: Sweatbox Dynasty. The new LP — his second for Ghostly International — finds the rural recluse resurrecting an old approach to hack a new path through the muck. This may be his most unintentionally psychedelic and leftfield creation yet, full of rhythms that start and stop like a tractor on its last piston, resonating melodies made to fuel transcendental meltdowns, and vocals that hiss, gurgle, and growl.