Review of Phanerothyme taken from the
Italian magazine
RUMORE #116 / September 2001.
English translation done by Sunchild.

MOTORPSYCHO
Phanerothyme
Stickman

To give evidence, starting by the title, of their deep ties with psychedelia, that seems, to characterize them each day more, Motorpsycho use for their new album a word that, according to Aldous Huxley, can be used to represent in a less common way psychedelia. Being Phanerothyme nothing more than psichotropic substance.
Here they are again, the Norwegian hippies. Happy and immutable like always. Like Fugazi they have found the neverending elixir of youth. A slow inexhaustible progress. Without the ambitious aims, neither the stress coming from fame nor the competitiveness typical in bands under majors. By this point of view, the new record strengthens the relaxed direction of these last years – we have to remember that the band made its debut with a very hard album, the heavy grunge Lobotomizer.
Motorpsycho's ballads are marked with an absolutely unmistakable style. With an eye nowadays focused on – and this is a something new – Burt Bacharach, whose music is often used as background for peaceful and psychedelic raids in the English folk.
Bedroom Eyes and For Free make the idea clear right away. While episodes like The Slow Phaseout and When You're Dead maybe reveal a solid use of the before mentioned substance... Landslide, then, is extraordinary, between the new English acoustic scene and... the Yes (is it Jon Anderson singing?), showing wonderful harmonical textures and sublime vocal passages, in a really suggestive baroque latch of flutes and piano.
Motorpsycho gracefully slides between styles and times absorbing the best and leaving out the excess of the music of our lives. Both getting them and making us richer, in a persevering and continuous growing perspective.

Claudio Sorge