Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Pordenone / Il Deposito Giordani / Italy
Concert date: 07.05.2016
Attendance: 500
Ticket price: €22.00 (advance) / €26.00 (day of show)
Motorpsycho and their new album »Here Be Monsters«. The promo run through the old European continent made its stop closest to Slovenian soil in Pordenone, Italy. It was even their only show in the northeastern part of the Apennine Peninsula. The long-lived trio from Trondheim, Norway, going strong without a break since way back in 1989, remains a constant artistic variable, forever »bending« and stretching the reach of its musical message, refusing to get stuck in molds or fall into the traps of clichés. The band, most often labeled a »revivalist« offshoot of the many influences of old-school psychedelic and progressive rock acts from the late sixties and early seventies, works with total artistic freedom, unburdened, and in its unbridled, exploratory adventurism keeps writing a homegrown story of creative insight.
The trio played without a support act. The backdrop alone, with five extra rustic-looking spotlights, made it clear that a band with unusual musical horizons was about to hit the stage, one followed by a clearly defined base of music fans. Two Mellotrons, even more so. And sure enough, a solid crowd of around six hundred devotees had gathered, and they greeted the trio with thunderous applause as it came on. Then Bent Sæther, the singer, bassist, guitarist and keyboardist, said in a lucid little address that the venue supposedly has a reputation for extreme loudness, and that Motorpsycho would start with some special, barely audible quiet playing. He announced the opener Big Black Dog (an extremely ambitious, almost 20-minute epic suite), and the band instantly melted into one body with the audience. The front rows in particular were a real bunch of hardcore fans, who during the longer repetitive stretches of the songs went through proper delirious fits, swept along by the transcendental-cerebral pull of Motorpsycho’s music. What’s more, some of the crowd knew the minimal verses, which often serve as an occasional bit of seasoning, by heart. A big-hearted audience.
The band felt it too, and gave that big-heartedness right back in their performance. They built an incredible backdrop of impenetrable wall of sound, conjured exclusively from tube amps and old guitar models that wrote the story of rock’n’roll, long, long ago. Motorpsycho alternated mild, almost flawlessly naive song segments with a furious, massively greasy, sonically »crunchy-wrecked« thickening of the sound, which, backed by the wall of Mellotrons, produced an effect of atmospheric hypnosis, a »trip-oid« state of crafted moods (for example the new I.M.S., an acronym for Inner Mounting Shame). The influence of Pink Floyd’s psychedelic era (I’m thinking of the »Meddle« period) was obvious, especially when the band tackled the new Lacuna / Sunrise, where Hans »Snah« Magnus Ryan picked up a double-neck guitar and, particularly at the start, coaxed sounds out of the twelve-string neck (stereo chorus effects, a venomously reverbed tone) that strongly recalled the primal sound of the craftsmen of Pink Floyd’s psychedelic era. But so we don’t stop at Pink Floyd, it’s no news that Motorpsycho have always been enchanted by the legacy of West Coast psychedelic pop/rock, once made by Grateful Dead, Iron Butterfly and a few others. So the setlist also featured a particularly tantalizing cover of Spin Spin Spin, which originally belongs to Terry Callier (he released it on his debut in 1968) and was later first covered by the American psychedelic rock band H.P. Lovecraft, and the Motorpsycho version didn’t stray far from that atmosphere either.
In moments of longer repetitions of chosen phrases, the band made fuller use of the untapped talents of drummer Kenneth Kapstad, who focused more actively on filling the space with repeated rolls across the toms. At the same time Kenneth, who has played with Hans and Bent since 2007, showed remarkable skill and inventiveness, conjuring up incredible softness and flexibility, especially in moments that call for full-blooded feel and a plasma of sensitivity (the cymbal work). It’s no longer surprising, either, that Motorpsycho’s music shamelessly consorts with elements of post-rock, ever more popular in the musical underground, as they sustain and build up a trip-oid backdrop of chosen phrases, which can be »cut through« by a pulsating, almost »droned-out« bass guitar (the song I.M.S.).
The band played for two hours and fifteen minutes of hefty repertoire, in which they didn’t forget their older catalog, including a pleasant surprise in Feel (album »Timothy’s Monster«, 1994) and three tracks from the third album »Demon Box« (1993) – Tuesday Morning, and right at the end of the show Junior and Nothing to Say. The band is hugely ambitious and fearless live. They change up their live repertoire regularly. No two shows are identical, since the setlists keep shifting from night to night.
What to say in closing? Hypnosis, the enchantment of a special get-together of »beauty« and the »beast« in a homegrown musical treat. After the show you’re left in a state of rapture, not even realizing when and how effectively Motorpsycho sucked you into their musical world, beyond reality. Given their musical track record and a homegrown adventurism full of in-your-face provocation, Motorpsycho would be a perfect fit for the concert program of CUK Kino Šiška. Who knows, maybe they’ll stop by here on their next tour!
Setlist
1. Big Black Dog
2. Un chien d’espace
3. Blueberry Daydream
4. Sleepwalking
5. Lacuna/Sunrise
6. Tuesday Morning
7. Feel
8. Running With Scissors
9. I.M.S.
10. Spin, Spin, Spin
11. The Alchemyst
12. Wishing Well
13. Upstairs-Downstairs
14. Cloudwalker (A Darker Blue)
15. Junior
16. Nothing to Say
Photo Gallery
