- Lots of things have surprised me about Rotsler’s Rules, the new record by Naarm / Melbourne band Black Cab. To begin with, while I wasn’t looking, one of my favourite little bands turned twenty-three, which doesn’t seem possible; I guess it’s their endlessly fresh-sounding retro-futurism which fooled me. With each release they’re just a bit more science-fictional and future-focused than on the one before -the genres they started playing so many years ago are definitely not the ones they’re playing now- and so it’s like they’re getting younger, or travelling backwards in time. The truth is, they’re unbound by the strictures of linear progression, heading backwards in history even as their sound surges forward. 

The next surprise is William ‘Bill’ Rotsler. I’m a sci-fi nerd, of a certain sort. For instance, I regularly look up the list of Hugo Award winners if I’m short of something to read. I never heard of Bill Rotsler before now, but he’s won four of them. The fan artist, illustrator and sci-fi writer lived in a slightly different part of the nerdiverse to me: he won that slew of gongs for his fan art I think, which is not something I know…really anything about. Also a sometimes pornographer -I don’t know how much crossover there is with his sci-fi work- Rotsler is a colourful character, whose backstory and artbooks are very much worth a -slightly prurient- look. If you do so you’re likely to come across a mention of Rotsler’s Rules: a manual of fan etiquette that will instruct the reader what they can wear, can’t wear and just how to wear it when cosplaying at conventions. The Rules themselves are quite a diverting read, illuminating fascinating chunks of fannish history and some hilarious anecdotes. See for evidence the ‘No Peanut Butter’ rule, but be warned, it’s not for the weak of stomach.

Black Cab are no strangers to a concept record. From their debut full-length, Altamont Diary, a retelling of the tragic events of the Stones’ concert at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway in 1969, to the muscle-obsessed Olympians that comprised the East German team at the ‘76 games in Montreal and also Black Cab’s Games Of The XXI Olympiad, this band love a good story. Even their re-soundtracking of the anime classic Akira is, in a way, a concept piece. Rotsler’s Rules appears to be exactly that sort of trip into the sepia-toned past, depicting the inner life of fans, so full of the joy of fantasy and how dressing up as someone else can let you be your best self. The most obvious example is the sentimentally charged Hanna, with its touching depiction of fandom and lyrics like “You’re never on your own … When you’re someone else.” The bittersweet, kosmische sounds of kraut and synthwave are the perfect aural accompaniment to that yearning, to just live the wonder of your imagination.

Some of the rest of the record is harder to unpick, like the mental illness depicted in Halo or the inadequate superheroes of the opening track. The sentiment “My superheroes always let me down” is the exact opposite of that fannish wonder. I don’t know what the significance is, but I’m sure there’s a backstory. The title track is easy to grasp in its aching nostalgia for the golden age of cons past. All of that love and commitment that are now only “Ghost in polaroids.” We’re “Not gonna play by Rotsler’s Rules no more.” Sad and yet, somehow, still wonderful.

If Games Of The XXI Olympiad was the record where Andrew Coates and James Lee really decided to abandon the guitar and embrace their synthesised Tangerine Dream, Rotsler’s Rules is, again, an eye-opener, because somehow it manages to be even more obsessively electronic. I think you can trace the reason for that to the record’s origins in the sessions where it was jammed out in collaboration with Graeme Pogson, whose work in GL, among other things, revealed him to be a complete fanatic for sounds like electro-boogie and new wave. Maybe revealing its jam session origins, I sometimes wondered if the track demarcations here are kind of arbitrary: as if everyone just agreed to slap down some dividers in this long synthsplosion, just so they could actually deliver some 'songs'.

I’d say Rotsler’s Rules will be the closest Black Cab ever come to making a nerdcore record, but for a band as transformative as they are, anything is possible. Who knows where their next dive into the retro-future will take them? Even the solidity of history starts to melt thanks to lyrical retellings like these. I can say that every temporal jaunt I take with Black Cab, backwards, forwards or both at the same time, I’m pretty happy I went.

- Chris Cobcroft.