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I liked the album after the first spin, I loved after the third. Each of these songs has a mood, a riff or a surprise that speaks to me. I'd love to see all of these played live! Love the mystyc vibes and darkness of this album, it fits the spirit of these times: Music is such a good transmitter … and nobody is able to deliver as good as motorpsycho does for almost 30 years now â¤
What I personally don't like on this album: the extreme effects on the vocals and the metal-soloing by Snah (sorry Hans, I prefer you Neil Young style) Sometimes less is more …
How about a spring tour 2022:
Less is more? More is more!
"Fever cities, longer stays"
(Doublenighters to avoid travelling and burning of resources)
1. "Pandemic night" – KoO+TAIO (N.O.X.!)
2. "Freedom night" – anything goes!
@Tomcat: Great, I like people offering solid solutions to difficult situations
:STG: :MPD:I second the comments about the guitar solos. Snah is one of the very few guitarists who manages to really tell stories with his soloing – uplifting, creating friction with the harmonies and just making it an additional voice. Reading comparisons to bands like DT, who treat music like a competition of skills, is pretty much the most horrible thought i can think of :lol: It also makes the lurker's final part rather difficult for me – live of course it might work as the ultimate madness crescendo.
Hehehe… don't get me wrong. I can'T listen to the DT Masturbating anymore at all. And as long as it doesn't become the usual way Shah plays solos, what you can say for sure won'T happen, i am fine with it
@ Johnny_Heartfield: "A little light music" it ain't. Stupid idiot!
Though based on modernized Sabbath sounds and a little pompous symphonic rock elements with the occasional very slight tendency towards solo drywank (sorry Snah!) – stuff I abhor (not the Sabbath of course) – Motorpsycho take a stylistic pile of shit and turn it into gold on this record. A very grown-up album, extremely sophisticated and very motorpsychedelic, despite all the musical changes over the years. When you get older you obviously lose some of the roughness and mindless energetic drive of adolescent years, but – in this case at least – gain a lot of experience, craft and a little humour and irony hardly found in stone(r)-age youngsters.
This album is a feast for the ears, and I still talk about the first two sides!
Have to correct myself again:
The best Motorpsycho album is always the one you listen to. Period.
@ Kid A: No!
Klassekampen Musikkekstra 19.4.21
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Huh…Tradition strikes again. I was rather lukewarm about the single, and the album after my first listen. But like so many times in the past, this beast of an album has grown on me like a flower in springtime. And now i can't get enough of it. Last year i pledged to shut up and let the next album settle before even thinking of reviewing/rating it. Couldn't quite do that this year, but ïll surely try for their next release…..because the new album is INSANE! Finding myself humming the folky melodies of The Hunt and Lady May, craving the hard hitters of The United Debase, Kingdom of Oblivion, Dreamkiller and The Lurker. Even The Waning grew on me, and ended up packing a powerful punch with the second part attached. And the chorus of At Empire's End is, although somewhat cheesy, still so contagious that it stuck in my head for days.
My only critique is the production. It is a little "sharp" and can be a bit of a strain on the ears at high volume. But that's a small price to pay.
Loving it!
Cheesy because it uses the word love, GBD?
Spotify stats show pretty clearly that this is the standout track.
@vegard: Not at all. More like the melody line itself having been used countless times before by other bands. No worries though….the song is great
Personally, I think one of the reasons why this album is so controversial is that it lacks the pop-ness that they have always worn.
That first guitar note after each verse line in United Debased is sooo Mammonumamikoma
First of all, never judge a Motorpsycho album until you listened to it at least 4 times. Early reviews are worthless as each of their albums demands a lot of attention to fully unveil themselves.
Same with this one. First listen: A couple of grins and some moments of goosebumps inbetween music which my mind and soul hasn't been able to fully comprehend and digest at first listen.
After 4 spins: It's still growing. It's as much a MP album as every other album. The title track and United Debased are instant classics. The quieter folk songs like Lady May or The Hunt are simply beautiful. The Lurker is a monster I haven't fully digested yet, but it keeps growing.
Dreamkiller blew me off my feet right from the start.
It seems they wanted to keep things more compact this time. Kingdom of Oblivion, Lady May and Dreamkiller leave me wishing they would have explored these songs further; they could easily have been 10min+ epics and I wish they wouldn't stop already where they do; instead, KoO and Lady May fade out suddenly while Dreamkiller also could have developed much further, Intrepid Explorer-style.
However, I agree with the production critique. Never liked compression, it's one of the music industry's worst habits of the past 20 years, alongside Autotune.
Phil Collins? Why would I? It really sounds like Sting singing there to me and I love it. Not that I'm a huge Sting fan. But I like some of The Police. One can respect musicians for what they do and did without really liking it, no? Except maybe for Phil Collins… great drummer in early Genesis, though.
What I find weird: I really like this new one a lot and listened to it about ten times now. But apart from The Waning chorus I couldn't whistle any song of it when out and about somewhere. Old age showing?
@ supernaut: Motorpsycho according to Sting – "If I ever lose my faith in you"…
@ ebo: you're absolutely right – the compression habit is awful, even on this gem.
I’ve held back a while before sharing my thoughts on this album, simply because, as others have said, it pays to give a new MP album some time to sink in. Furthermore, in this particular case, I really have had trouble making my mind up about it.
Although it’s been widely reported as a rock album punctuated by some folk(y) tunes, to me it could quite as easily be a folk album punctuated by some rock tunes. So here we are again with another Motorpsycho album that defies pigeonholing, another Motorpsycho album that contains tunes that could be categorized as belonging to various genres – just like Demon Box, Timothy’s Monster, Blissard and more. Moreover, the album, to my ears, definitely does not feel stuck in the same space as the Gullvag trilogy; it sounds like something different, something new to me.
Prior to the album’s release, and for some while now, I expressed how much I’d like to see Motorpsycho put out something that mixes acoustic folk with electric rock – something along the lines of Led Zeppelin III, After the Goldrush, Rust Never Sleeps, If I Could Only Remember My Name, Déjà Vu – and here we are with Kingdom of Oblivion, which perfectly fulfils that wish. However, I am yet to feel the disparate tracks fit together as a cohesive whole – in my listening there’s still a little dissonance between the Black Box tracks and the Kommun tracks. Slowly, though, they approach each other in the space between my ears and become less and less like two albums mashed together. Gradually, they take on the appearance of one.
And gradually I become more and more appreciative of each track. Strangely, though, it is the one track I expected to be an immediate winner (The Transmutation of Cosmoctopus Lurker) that has become the last to really grab me. This is probably due to the prog-metal-style soloing and because this is perhaps the track that, to my cloth ears, suffers worst from the lack of dynamics. In fact the lack of dynamics (a subject for which I don’t really have the technical knowledge but which I feel when I listen) is the only issue I have with the album, but it’s a serious issue and I hope they never go that way again.
As for the soloing, as usual with Snah, even when he plays in the style of another genre, or even another guitarist, it’s just Snah widening his palette and in the end, all I hear is the Snah essence behind it all – the divine Snah Godhead shining through. 😊
All in all this has been a harder album for me to get into than any of the three previous studio outings, but that’s not a problem, just a challenge and one I’m happy to take on – I mean, who among us wouldn’t be pleased to have to suffer a challenging MP album? 😉
Favourite tracks (at the moment): Kingdom Of Oblivion; Lady May; At Empire’s End; The Hunt
@ Punj Lizard: I have the same problem with the Lurker. Not because it's a bad song (loving the ideas that are put together), but rather the sound issues that i feel are most prominent on this track. Wanted to show it to a buddy of mine who has a pretty decent sound system, and i was blown away by how murky and (as you said) dynamically void it sounded. Wonder what happened there.
On the flipside: I think The Hunt is now my new fav. on the album
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