Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
@punknotyet – 8O That's too funny.
And while we're about it. I'd love to hear about other people's journies and how their love of the band has turned them into mad Motorpsychotics.
Come on Bartok. What's your story?
@Kid A – I know what you mean, but that passion can easily undermine level-headedness and unbiased critique. That's why we see so many 'reviewers' writing such rubbish these days. A fan is not necessarily going to be a good critic, or a fair one. And at the other end of the spectrum, we also get profitable mags like Rolling Stone thinking they are the arbiters of good taste in rock music, and therefore the ones who not only come up with the ridiculous notion of a Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, but think themselves the ones best suited to decide who should be considered to go into it (what a fucking daft and ridiculous thing that is – I hoped Yes would never be inducted, but they were).
But thanks – I really do appreciate your point.
I was introduced to Motorpsycho by two friends who I got to know through, and mostly only ever meet at, concerts. They had mentioned MP several times and for a couple of years had on occasion urged me to listen to them, but somehow I just didn’t get around to it. Then they said MP were coming to town (London, Oct 2017) and that I really shouldn’t miss it. So I said, OK, tell me where to start. One of them suggested Phanerothyme and Behind the Sun. He didn’t want to overload me and he thought they would be (a) accessible and (b) varied enough to pique my interest. I listened to Phano first, realising that somehow I’d heard Go To California before, at that friend’s house. It was all pleasant enough and GTC has a great hook and is a fantastic distillation of late-60s West Coast sounds (Doors, Mamas and Papas, Beach Boys, CSNY, Jefferson Airplane), but it didn’t get its hooks in me. Behind the Sun also sounded good, but again it didn’t really do it. But I bought a ticket for the gig anyway and consequently decided I had to give them a proper shot. So I listened to both those albums twice more. On the third run through of Phano, For Free suddenly hit me; and on the third run through of BHS, it was the guitar solo in Hell, Part 4–6. I then sat up and took notice!
Like most people I listen to music under varied circumstances, but am especially lucky that working from home, I can play music when I’m doing some of the more laborious and less mental tasks. That allows me to hear/listen to a lot of music, but sometimes it takes a while or a special moment before something really hits me. But when it does I start to pay more attention of course.
Listening to Phano and BHS I had at first been surprised, obviously, that these two albums were by the same band. I had also looked briefly at their back catalogue as listed on ProgArchives – a pretty good source for getting an idea of what a band has released as well as a rating system based on members’ individual ratings. Of course I quickly realised that MP were fairly prolific, but I’ve been around long enough to be into or familiar with plenty of bands/artists that have released lots of albums (Zappa, Neil Young, Bill Laswell, Ravi Shankar for example). The question though was where to continue after Phano and BHS. Well The Tower was on its way and as I had a ticket to see them I figured it would pay to get familiar with that – I figured they’d play at least a couple of songs from that album (most ‘old’ bands seem to be tied by promoters’ wishes that they play the music that made them popular [i.e. the old stuff] so I didn’t expect more than a couple of tracks to be aired at the gig – how wrong I was). But I also followed my usual approach and picked out the higher rated albums (4 stars +) on ProgArchives, which are (in date order): Trust Us (4.08), Phano (4.14), Fishtank (4.17), DDU (4.16), BHS (4.02). (FYI The Tower is now 4.02, and The Crucible 4.03.) So I listened to Trust Us, which just fucking blew my mind. I knew the earlier material was going to be more grungy, but I was not prepared for just how much I’d like this album! Next up Fishtank, which also fucking blew my mind because it’s primarily a jazz/rock fusion album. Wait, what? And Tristano was just mesmerising. And then DDU, which after one or two spins I couldn’t listen to for quite a long while because it was just too rich. I still find it overwhelming – there’s so much to digest. For me it stands equal to the very best double concept albums I’ve been listening to for donkeys years: Yes –Tales from Topographic Oceans; Genesis – The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway; The Who – Quadrophenia. (I’m tempted to add Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life to that list, but is it really a concept album?) And it makes Pink Floyd’s The Wall look somewhat childishly pathetic.
So there I was, six completely different albums by one band. I now had an urge to know what they sounded like live as a look at the track listings on the RW albums made it clear they were extending their songs somewhat. Friends recommended RW4, so I bought that too. But the only song on that that I knew to date was Landslide (Phano). But then I also somehow stumbled upon the video of 577 live from RW3 and that was a fucking revelation in itself! Watching that video I was transported back to Led Zeppelin’s performance of ‘No Quarter’ in the film The Song Remains the Same, my favourite track from that film and one of my favourite Page solos. It’s an entirely difference style, but that watching HMR create a solo out of mostly chords and carrying it higher and higher, well I think that was when I started to understand snahisgod and he started to become what I can now easily say: one of my three all-time favourite guitarists (the other two being Steve Howe from Yes and Andy Glass from UK folk-prog band Solstice).
More importantly, this is when I began to realise that Motorpsycho are not actually a band, they’re a phenomenon. OK, ok, we can say all great musicians, bands are phenomena, sure. The Dead, Zeppelin, Bowie, Shankar, Zappa, Young, Mitchell, Hendrix, the Beatles, the Pistols and so on. But in MP’s case, there was something different, something I couldn’t yet grasp. So I started to listen to more albums. Yes, primarily the Kenneth era ones, but slowly and surely pushing further and further back. I was wary of Lobotomizer, 8 Soothing Songs and Demon Box. I don’t particularly like metal in the form of thrash, death, black metal, with screaming vocals, and that was what I had told myself I would find in those albums. But I had loved Trust Us and also really liked a lot of AADAP, which I bought as the box set so as to ensure I had the full three EPs. Yes, Blissard took a while for me to get into, but as is often the case, the headphones took care of that. Like most people, with headphones I can immerse myself in the sound and texture, and that’s what was needed. I also had to get past the whole lo-fi thing. In the 90s I wasn’t listening to new 90s bands – sure, a bit of Nirvana and Soundgarden that crossed my path, odds and ends here and there, but I was living in Canada and India during that time, running a small business and meditating. The music I listened to was either Sanskrit or Hindi chanting, Hindu devotional music, Bhangra, or Jah Wobble, Bill Laswell, Transglobal Underground, some reggae, some dub, Ozric Tentacles, some folk. So the current rock scene and the bands that were, I guess, marked as grunge, indie or alternative mostly passed me by. So lo-fi was a bit odd to me. That made listening to both TM and Blissard a bit difficult. But tracks like The Wheel, Giftland, The Golden Core, and Manmower and STG had a more positive immediate effect. After that it was just listening to those albums enough times and in the right environment for them to get their hooks in me.
The pop period was rather more accessible, and it’s those three albums, and BH/BC that really revealed to me what a fucking great songwriter Bent is. That also helped me access and appreciate some of the songs on TM and Blissard that I had found less immediately accessible.
As for DB and earlier, that was a bit of hard work, but again, what was I going to do? The band had proven to me that they make great music in all genres they touch. I’m not overly fond of Lob, 8, DB, but here is a phenomenon finding its place. I love a couple of the songs on Lob and 8, for example Step Inside, but the genre style doesn’t work so well for me. Same with the Tussler albums – there’s some great songs, but the style doesn’t get me excited.
DB is something different though. This was clearly their moment and listening to it I realised why. I don’t warm to all the songs on it, but as a complete album, there’s no questioning its brilliance, its audacity, and its statement. This was a band to reckon with. Join in or get out of the way because we’re here, we’re moving forwards, and we’re not stopping for any muthafucka. But I still can’t understand how Mountain was removed from that album. I had never heard it when they played it at my second MP gig in Köln in Nov 2017, which was odd because prior to the London gig I had been following the playlists of the tour, which also fucked with my head (especially when the Bremen setlist was posted), and I’d been picking out the songs they were playing and listening to them if I hadn’t yet heard them. In Köln (one of the greatest live experiences of my life), it was one great jam after another. Mountain was for me perhaps the highlight after the 42 minutes of K9, though it’s hard to say, it was such a mind-blowingly magnificent gig.
By now (I mean in Köln) I had started to develop in my brain a theory about what made the band so special, unique as far as I’m concerned. I tried desperately to explain to Tomcat who I met for the first time that evening. How do you explain to someone who’s seen the band nearly a hundred times and been following them since lord knows when, your theory about what makes that band special when you’ve only been into them for a few months? Not only that, I had convinced myself that there was a German word, used in philosophy or some other branch of the arts and social sciences, that pretty much encapsulated my thoughts. English people are famously useless at non-English languages and here I was, talking to a German whose English is pretty much perfect. D’oh!
Anyway, I think one of the terms I was grasping for was gessamelte Werke, which means roughly ‘collected works’. The other is Weltanshauung, which means, roughly, world view, or a comprehensive philosophy or conception of the universe. My point is that MP is not a band that puts out albums. MP is a phenomenon that can only be appreciated, or rather is best appreciated as a whole, as a collection of works and actions and approaches and intentions that all feed into that whole. A whole that is propelled by the band’s world view, which appears to be to live for music and to never let one part be separate from the whole.
Write music. Make music. Play music. Record music. Rehearse the music. Play with it. See what happens when you strap on a guitar. Go with it. Develop it. Never let that music which has already been written, recorded and played get old. Never let the new music be treated as anything less than the old music – play it, play with it. They seem always to want to be getting on with it. Never taking it easy, never resting on laurels, never thinking a particular song has had its time. Keeping their art alive and kicking; keeping it immediate; keeping it in the now. And like I said about Demon Box: we’re here, we’re moving forwards, and we’re not stopping for any muthafucka. That apparent statement seems as true today as then. And the beauty of it all, of this gessamelte Werke, this Weltanschauung, is that it creates a feedback loop. Everything they do and have done seems to infinitely feedback into what they’re doing now, and now, and now and they work to keep that alive. In the studio, in the rehearsal space, on stage. (And even in their relationship to the music they listen to, whether new or old, punk or classical.) It’s a fucking glorious thing to witness. Of course they may not be the only band to work like this, but I don’t know (a) any others that kept it up for so long (b) any others that actually appear to make it their raison d’être (c) any others whose almost entire catalogue I also actually happen to love. So when I listen to DB, I may not like all I hear, but I fucking absolutely appreciate what is going on and what happened at that moment. And the same feeling feeds into all the albums I listen to.
Finally. You ask what do I consider their ‘best’ period? The one that stretches from about 1989 to 2019. I have my favourite albums: Trust Us, Phanerothyme, Fishtank, HMF, DDU, BHS, Folk Flest, HBM/HBM2, The Tower (I will probably add The Crucible to that list). So I guess the Kenneth era contains more albums that do it for me – but that is just my taste and by no means meant as a critical statement – and so far, not a single bummer in the Tomas era.
And before The Crucible came out, my three go-to albums were Child of the Future, The Motorpnakotic Fragments, and Barracuda, three ‘albums’ that I had earlier considered as pretty ordinary. But I don’t consider any period ‘better’, they just have different qualities that seem to shine as the band progresses, evolves, refuses to be tied down, refuses to stand still. Does this answer your question(s)?
EDIT: Having just read through this, I should add that for those who think all the philosophical meanderings about worldview etc. is all just ridiculously self-important, high-minded guff, I can't disagree. It's easy to lose perspective when you're obsessed by something.
@ Bartok – Thanks for your comments and your questions. I'll respond in a new thread so as not to bother this one.
I was initially put off by the cover, but based on the responses I had to listen. What a ride! Some of it ticks all the right boxes for me, but the problem is the bits that don't. Will definitely give it another listen – it's an immense piece of work well worth a listen and possibly more.
Metal.de
Translated from German by Deepl
MOTORPSYCHO now follow the huge "The Tower" with "The Crucible". Three men, three songs, three announcements. Because Hans Magnus Ryan (guitars, vocals), Bent Sæther (bass, vocals) and recently Tomas Järmyr (drums) pose at least considerable challenges to the ear trained at other big conservatory triads like SODOM and the MENTORS. The title song alone is more than 20 minutes long – during this time the mentioned ghosts have already accommodated entire albums. And "The Crucible" accommodates more styles than "Obsessed By Cruelty" chords. On the one hand.
MOTORPSYCHO go also without previous education
On the other hand, MOTORPSYCHO manage, as usual, that their music is not only waved through by music-as-science-understanders. And that "The Crucible" probably won't be highly praised – you don't want to expose yourself for security reasons, but can't name a single song after two weeks – will be forgotten.
The three gentlemen never lose sight of the song despite all their hooks and feints. (And better, the description sounds worn out than their object.)
"Psychotzar" at the beginning is increased by gong blows and Mellotron is darkly decorated, but remains grounded by a concise and catchy early seventies iommi riff. Including classic rock solo, distinctive bass and hypnotic harmony vocals, the piece goes comparatively directly into the bloodstream.
"The Crucible" deep fries Psychedelic and Prog Rock deluxe
"Lux Aeterna" then begins to indulge in BEATLES megalomania, the acoustic sounds to polyphonic singing, then the strings come, at some point isolated riffs, manic drumming – and the jazz rock madness breaks out without a trace. John Zorn successfully tries to come close to an actual song. And that's the special thing about MOTORPSYCHO: Three guys (not only according to rock standards) turn instrumentally completely free for a few minutes and yet the whole thing doesn't sound like an end in itself and too small a penis. But exciting. And pretty cool. That the song ends quiet again after a wild Rock'n'Roll transition fits.
And the title track? Everything for 20 minutes? "Writing about music is like dancing to architecture." (KETTCAR) Or rather: Some things simply shouldn't be dissected excessively. It's still rock. But in the Sweaty-Deluxe-Version. Overwhelming. Psychedelic and Prog Rock are artfully fried into an oversized acoustic snack.
Cautious hint: Better become a Psychonaut. Now.
4/5 from Sputnik
https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/78981/Motorpsycho-The-Crucible/
Given that the average MP album is 57 minutes in length (based on how I personally prefer to relate to the releases [YMMV]) I can begin to see why some might say The Crucible feels like an EP, though for someone like me who lived out their teenage years prior to the advent of the CD, there's no question that it's an album. But this points up another of the speacial things about this band: the variety. Not only in music, in setlists, in performances of each song, in styles and genres, but in album formats and lengths too. Yeah I know we all already know this, but I never get tired of talking about stuff (like this) that really singles out MP's extraordinariness. We are indeed, as Bartok and so many others here have said, spoilt.
Article on Gullvåg, with brief section on MP collaboration.
Quote:His playing there has much of the spirit of his 96-98 kind of playing – less noodling, more screaming and going for it, nevermind the occasional flub.Yes, Shakti! This!
@Ercarner – Thanks. Sometimes I feel like I should reign it in. Among all you long-time fans I feel a little naïve, but then I think, fuck that, this band is so freaking amazing. My old-time favourite band Yes were basically spent after 10 years, with the odd occasional moment of inspiration, but how MP continue, album after album, year after year, for thirty years (THIRTY YEARS!!!) to still put out immense albums like this just beggars belief. And with the way they play live I remain constantly in awe.
