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Charles Moothart has spent more than a decade in the deep end of the garage-rock world: guitar and drums in Ty Segall's live bands, half of the bruising duo Fuzz, a member of GØGGS, and three solo albums under the CFM name. Black Holes Don't Choke is the first record he has put out under his own name, written, recorded, mixed, and played top to bottom by Moothart alone at his Los Angeles studio. He calls it apocalyptic pop, and that fits: signature fuzz and big, dynamic riffing tangled up with electronic texture across ten tracks he frames as love songs for the apocalypse.
We are pressing it as a Levitation Edition, and that is the whole reason it is here. When a record this self-made lands on our shelves, we want a version that does it justice, so we put our name on this one.
What gets us about Black Holes Don't Choke is how restless it is. Moothart never sits in one mode for long: a track will open as a hard-rock churn, drop into a synth passage, then ease out on a mellow acoustic groove, all of it stitched together by guitar playing that stays the constant through every left turn. There is sampling, sequencing, and a few hip-hop-shaped moves in the rhythms, and the fact that he handled every inch of it solo only makes the swing between heavy and weird land harder.
The press read it about the same way we do. Far Out gave it a fair three out of five and tagged it a grower; The Fire Note went a notch higher at three-and-a-half, calling it his most adventurous to date. Both clock the genre-hopping, and both expect it to deepen on repeat spins.
The honest knock is that the kitchen-sink approach can feel scattered on a first pass, when one idea jumps to the next before it fully settles. Give it room, though, and the sprawl reads as confidence rather than restlessness. That is exactly the kind of record that earns wax: a one-man swing for the fences that rewards the listener who keeps coming back. Ours runs Purple and Custard Swirl + Splatter, limited to 250.
Recommended if you like: Ty Segall, Fuzz, Mikal Cronin.
