Eric Copeland is no stranger to contraposition. From his earliest days as a member of Black Dice Copeland’s work has held an air of indifference to public understanding, a lack of desire to know if you’re smelling what he’s stepping in. This is the dude that when reflecting on the alienation of Dice’s early fanbase after the release of their second record (and the subsequent drop of attendance at their shows) quipped without a hint of distaste, “we lost all the pretty people.” So you know when you see the garish pink bubble figure displaying its middle finger from the cover of Copeland’s latest solo LP, Black Bubblegum, you’re going to have to relax your preconceptions or risk falling into the unfortunate camp of the pretty people left behind by the punks.
I wonder if the title Black Bubblegum borrows the modifier from black metal, applying the genre’s cold and alien aesthetic to bubblegum pop. While the sonic fundamentals of the record will be familiar to those hip to Copeland’s vast solo output – hypnotic, cartoonish riffs cut-and-pasted over swooning, off-kilter drum machine grooves – the importance given to melody, lyrics and identifiable song structure puts this record, arguably for the first time in his career, firmly in the arena of pop music. This will be too much for a certain sector of the noise-dork cognoscenti – to them I say, “hold thy spongy tongue, inhale and listen in, dawg.” Those unburdened by the attachments of elitism will find a freewheeling joy of a psychedelic electro-pop record. The clean-ish vocals allow a whole new cast of relatable characters to develop within Copeland’s typically ego-transcendent musical world. Sometimes he sounds like Captain Beefheart fronting a mid-nineties Nickelodeon version of the Ramones; sometimes he sounds like a pissed off Calvin at the talent show with Hobbes on keyboards and a stoned Dennis the Menace playing some blissed-out rhythm guitar. It’s possible that some will miss the otherworldly free-form sonic explorations found in Copeland’s earlier work, however I argue he’s never been closer to the source of his message than when he urges you on the stand-out track of the same name to FUCK IT UP, FUCK IT UP, FUCK IT UP, FUCK IT UP.
