Rubber Blanket

***Our Fault, the sophomore album from Los Angeles’ RUBBER BLANKET, thoroughly trounces the laziness cabal. Its 10 tunes beckon listeners to embark on a preternatural sojourn under the collective Blanket of BRAD EBERHARD, LARS FINBERG and JUN OHNUKI (survivors all of WOUNDED LION), three artists and composers, working together forever and then some. Before today, Rubber Blanket had never visited the racetrack in Santa Anita. They agreed to meet there for one specific reason: betting it all on a horse named Pepsi. They’re in queue at the ticket window wearing matching Wall Of Voodoo shirts, which even they think is absurd. It’s a $35 bet to show. They lose but vow to return.

Unless there’s literal goo-goo-gah-gah, the notion that Rockish Musics with discernable peculiarities must possess childlike predilections is shite nouveau, serving only to signal that the experimental market is not blonde enough to churn hype butter. This kind of trash-think ignores the existence of real wonderment, as if the constant ingestion of multiverse stimuli couldn’t / wouldn’t / shouldn’t impact the capacity for marvel within the living human sponge. Our Fault is bright enough to recognize and even reproduce this strange ever-growing awe.

Rubber Blanket eat Del Taco late-nite while cruising in a convertible yellow Miata, chit-chatting loudly over a skipping Shadow Ring compact disc playing out of the dash console. There’s lettuce everywhere, which is refreshing if you really think about it. They hit a red light, let it turn green, then yellow, then back to red again. They dig on the coolness of the pattern while fellow motorists repeatedly honk.

Rubber Blanket proffers a distinct humor/horror collective consciousness, coaxed via a crate of oddball musical machinery and arranged in a matter that that bucks all subterranean boogie traditions. A tumultuous, somehow scientifically programed spontaneity, bottled on Our Fault. Different Rock’n’Roll, bright and strange.