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@ Captain A,suntripper and shakti: very good and important points!
I just thought/felt I had to add a different view, because the more fun in the audience the more fun on stage at the ongoing tour.{I Hope)
If you don’t spread bad or no feelings, you can analyse how much you like :)
But of cause, it’s not easy to leave the 20,50 or 100+ shows behind and feel like a PsychonautvirginI share the conscience’s view on the 2006 tour with Jacco. And let’s not put too much weight on Olaf’s shoulders – good, that he stepped in, otherwise there woulnd’t be a Norwegian leg of the tour – or just a folky duo, which, for a fan, might still be of some interest ;-).
@ suntripper: Also looking forward to Bent-Snah-Ingvald. Reine is not part of the line-up in Europe (south of Norway) – or am I wrong? Would be great anyway…
What Shakti wrote about the gig exactly mirrors my experience. In fact, I was very happy to read this spot on review because it confirmed my experience, which was so bad at the show I thought I must have been in a pretty skewed headspace to even consider leaving the show. I seriously doubted my own assessment (stone cold sober the whole night, btw). I mean, what kind of psychonaut walks out of a Motorpsycho show midway? Well, I thought, if you walked out now, it’s not like you would miss much because THIS is not going to improve…
The sound was really so loud and so bad, I feared about my health and it emphasized the many deficits of this line up and gig, i.e. Olaf’s thin drum sound and lack of tightness, cringy vovals, not so interesting setlist, relatively uninspired jams, The acoustic/laid back stuff was wonderful though and should have been extended to half of the gig.
I am to sad to say I agree on all of the above. I hope MP and Tomas can unite again very soon.
With Geb you mean
Funny how perceptions differ!
After being quite bored by the bands seemingly endless drift into reference heavy and technically proficient wankery, I have been in dire need of something else. Yay! was the perfect album at the perfect time for me, and this concert also mostly scratched the same itch.
Absolutely love Tomas and all he does, but for this night the change really appeared to have relaxed the whole operation. Especially Bent appeared considerably more casual than I’ve seen him in quite some while. While I was expecting him having to work overtime as drum director as he did with Jacco, everything was just fun. Technical issues? Slight fuckups? No worries! Motherfucker speeding up as he’s grooving on Überwagner? I absolutely love that shit!
Rather than the slightly removed herculean instrumental efforts emphasized from the dawn of Kenneth, this was now just a collection of incredible musicians with a vast back catalogue having a good time. Sound was also good where I was standing, and even Go to California grew from tired novelty act to something vital and vibrant. Cold & Bored-> Kill some day almost killed me, and Sinful, Wind-Born? Holy shit!
Also, for a fan that really prefer the 90s output, it was just a joy to see the band shifting focus from the more demanding side of their catalogue. The only thing that could really improve upon this Saturday would be a wholesale exorcism of the more technical mothball prog, like especially The United Debased (The new Neverland?) and Gullible. Not only because these songs were a poorer fit for Olaf, but also as I’ve never enjoyed this aspect of new-ish Motorpsycho to begin with. And what’s the deal with all the covers? As encore?
Anywhoo! Not posting much these days, but were actually flabbergasted with the lukewarm takes up in here. And as for people leaving concerts early – I actually left early on Tomas’ last gig in Trondheim. That shit was horrendous!
If that’s true, I am looking forward to the Oldenburg gig (minus bad sound). I am quite fed up with years of heavy jamming and would dig a concert with mainly short songs with nice melodies and maybe 2 or 3 long classics!
Wow, never read such harsh words from die-hard/long-term forum dwellers. In a way i am now both sad and glad i don’t get to see the temporary line-up. Some of the post-Geb gigs i attended were a let down, most were brilliant….so i am not too worried. That’s part of the mechanics of the band i guess….often they lift off and sometimes they don’t. And i simply can’t imagine they “unlearned” how to do a proper live show! Come on, who are we talking about here
Looking forward to Dresden.What I think is funny is that some people praise the return to a lighter and more song-friendly vibe with Yay! and equate Tomas with only “reference heavy technically proficient wankery” (great term BTW!).
I kind of, sort of understand what you guys are getting at, but the fact remains that the Tomas era brought us all sorts of different things:
– Yay!
– The Ole Paus collaboration
– some quite oddball tracks on KOO including some acoustic gems
– half of The All Is One is really very melodic, classic MP. Not quite a 90s sound, but it’s no longer the 90s.
– The Tower is possibly their most varied album since AADAP or at least BH/BC.So I just can’t agree that the 2017-22 period was all heavy wankery. There were some songs that seemed to go missing and some of those were brought back on this tour, but as much as I pine for 90s Motorpsycho (it’s what made me a fan after all) I would rather have them as a searching, probing “relevant” band and not a nostalgia act. IMO that’s what we got with Tomas. They didn’t always hit bullseye, but with him in the drummer’s chair I didn’t see a single sub-par show.
Oh! Absolutely no shade intended on Tomas. As mentioned, I absolutely adore his playing, I just think the introduction of more technically inclined and über-proficient drummers in MP unlocked some tendencies within especially Bent that I find less interesting than the 90s and early 2000s stuff. Mostly preferences this, but I do miss the band that were switching up their stuff from album to album.
And as you rightly mention, there are indeed valid exceptions to the tendencies I mention, witch mostly serve to illustrate that Tomas were brilliant at all the stuff they put him to. I also really enjoyed quite a large portions of The Tower, and think that The Crucible might be their best album since Little Lucid Moments. I also prefer the overall output with Tomas over the records recorded with Kenneth.
I just miss a bit of the songs, and the fun, and the nerves, and joy. And while this weekends concert were far from perfect (who’d want that anyways), I just think the band is in a more interesting place than they have been in a while. I would of course have loved if they found this place again with Tomas, Kenneth or Geb, but for now it seems like I prefer my MP on more uncertain ground.
This is definitely one of the most interesting threads we have had for a long time.
Nobody loves the “heavy, technically proficient wankery” and improv more than me (even though I would probably rate a 90s album of short sharp songs, Blissard, as my second favourite MP album), but perhaps it was time to find another way forward. Having said, that, I thought Ancient Astronauts was terrific – really exciting and innovative, with Tomas at his best. It now stands as a tantalising glimpse of what might have been.
Perhaps there is not quite such a separation between pre-Kenneth material and W.C.A. (See what I did there?!) After all, I guess one could level the ‘wankery’ charge at some 90s material like Un chien d’espace (although I wouldn’t apply that term to any of the band’s output, still less such a revered item in the canon), while the Kenneth and Tomas eras did give us wonderful, compact, little gems such as Mockingbird.
I do think that those who favour the 90s incarnation of the band need to acknowledge that their music then had the spirit and energy of youth. However much their playing has progressed since then, it is a simple fact of life that men in their 50s will not quite be able to reproduce on stage all the visceral power of their earlier material, and it is natural, with maturity, that the music should find different forms of expression. Nevertheleless, I expect future output will include both shorter, more concise and composed songs (even though I believe Bent said at one time that he was done with that) and longer, more progressive (in the true sense of the word) pieces.
I hope the MP of the future will contain within itself elements of all that has made them great throughout their lifetime, while adding something new.
I think we can all sense the band crossing a bridge to somewhere, and nobody quite knows what lies on the other side. But I hope good times can still be had in this kind of a nomansland.
I will say again that I believe Ingvald is going to be the catalyst for something special to come. There is life in the old dog (or should that be ‘chien’?) yet!
This is turning into something quite different than where it started, but what the hell. I like the sound of my own pen sometimes it seems, and it’s pertaining to my overall enjoyment of the Verkstedhallen gig.
I wouldn’t call Un ‘Chien wanky, Suntripper, rather the opposite: A quite simple core that the band patiently develops for as long as it takes. The Wheel is another clear example of this: Just one or two stellar riffs that rolls effortlessly, brilliantly, builds and collapses. It was actually precisely this aspect of the band, and the related improvisations, that drew me in to begin with, with me seeing A K9 suite in the bargain bin of my local record store and just had to figure out what this 30:46 business was all about.
On the other hand, take Nox, Chariot, The Crucible, Hell 1-forever, etc. etc. Individually not bad songs at all (not all of them at least), but together they just form a sort of grey mass of behemoths which in comparison to the earlier monsters sounds cramped, overwritten, an yes … a bit wanky. After a while, and taken together with a lot of the musty leanings of the rest of the material, I just wanted Bent to write a god damned tune again. And while almost every record since LLM have had glimpses, they’ve been few and far between.
The above linguistic and musicological (?) confusion is probably my fault though, and the drawback of attempting to irreverently summarize 15 years of history. And all is subjective of course. One man’s wank is another man’s gold or something.. Wankery Iz A Poze, Hardt Rock Iz A Laifschteil? Also, we haven’t yet gotten to the goofy and persistent nods to Sabbath, Zeppelin etc, but that will have to wait for another day.
The main point was that MP used to be many things, before turning into something more fixed and less fun (for me). Now that the doors are kicked wide open again, I’m really struggling to understand the fans that focuses on the snare sound, counts the BPM and clocks the variation in fills of someone who probably didn’t have all that much time to learn a whole mess of songs. Rather: This reminds me of 2006. The backs are against the wall, and our favourite (yes!) band has to fight a bit again.
These are the struggles (either involuntary or self-imposed) that have previously sparked some of the bands best work. I’ll take that uncertainty over another lukewarm courting to the readers of Classic Rock Magazine any day.
@zomzom82: Believe me, I do get where you are coming from. I enjoy the way you write too. Keep it coming!
I’m with shakti. But I haven’t seen them on this tour yet. If nothing else, I’m very curious what’s it gonna be like and that’s a good thing. I’ve longed for a short-song-set for years now. Ever onward, embrace the changes.
btw I never considered MP as wankery. Despite the jams and long stretched compositions. I usually get easily bored by technical proficiency for sake’s sake but I never felt the band went there. It all made sense in a moody atmospheric way and the fact that once they’re locked in they groove as fuck doesn’t hurt either.
@zomzom82 This is almost exactly what I am thinking about that topic! Thanks for the write up.
#stopwanking
Mmmh, maybe not a hashtag that gets a lot of followers! Not even catholic priests…
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