Sweatbox Dynasty

Though the album isn’t an entreaty for mass acceptance, Tobacco’s music does sound increasingly comfortable in its stitched-up skin.

While the revved motors and displaced robot pop satisfy your expectations, you find the virus progressing too quickly for you to evaluate its efficiency. A blue bar at the bottom tracks the virus’s progress to completion; you’re quite alarmed to see this already halfway full, as if someone twisted the fabrics of time in your ears.

It's rare that someone has an idea this good and unique in the first place, double rare when someone can keep going back to that same idea and find new ways to express it. In that regard, Sweatbox Dynasty is another oddball triumph for a one-of-a-kind artist.

With 12 tracks and a run time of just 30 minutes, much of Tobacco's fourth solo LP almost sounds incomplete at times, but Fec somehow makes it work to his advantage.

Tobacco's stew of narcoleptic beats, tape experiments, Vocoder mutterings and vintage synths in states of distress has lost some potency in the nine years since BMSR's classic Dandelion Gum, but remains wholly idiosyncratic. [Sep 2016, p.81]

Fec’s most disturbing songs were often his funniest, but Sweatbox Dynasty rarely allows Fec’s puckish side to rise from the muck.

It's doubtful Sweatbox Dynasty will make it into anyone's regular rotation, but Fec has no doubt carved himself out a cozy little corner of difficult trash music, and a visit now and then is worth the effort.

Overflowing with gnarled pop melodies and stuttering beats, Sweatbox Dynasty may be decidedly askew, but the manipulations and distortions simply add character to what is in fact a very listenable album.

Closer “Let’s Get Worn Away” manages to be more anchored with its sonic goals, able to shift through six or seven different phases to make it clear that Fec is aiming for a collage-like final product. Elsewhere though, Sweatbox Dynasty is mostly just composed of individual pieces of a collage, a mashup, a pastiche, whatever you want to call it.