Motorpsycho

The fourth of Motorpsycho’s expanded archival sets revisits 1997’s Angels and Daemons at Play – a chronological and developmental follow-on from the earlier Blissard set…

After a series of epic, sprawling and headphones-friendly albums, Motorpsycho is back with a short, reasonably pop-formatted and intimate album of mainly acoustically based songs. For once playing the game instead of trying to reinvent it, this 10-song album of tunes is clearly a reaction in some way to too much architecture and too many grand visions, and dials the music down to more comprehensive and digestible sizes than have been the band's métier lately.

Continuing their nearly unbroken string of unclassifiably terrific albums, Norwegian trio Motorpsycho deliver one of their finest with the epic Black Hole/Blank Canvas. A two-disc, 17-track set, Black Hole/Blank Canvas leans more to the group's drony psychedelic side than its heavier acid rock sound, with a stronger than usual overlay of sweetly melodic pop hooks to go along with all the pleasurably noisy guitars…

Whether you ask bandmembers or longtime fans for the decisive moment when Motorpsycho became, for lack of a better word, themselves, almost all will point to Demon Box. It was the band's third and last album for Voices of Wonder Records. Their previous two, 1991's Lobotomizer and 1992's Soothe, showcased elements of the persona that gels here, but not the totality. Demon Box moves far beyond the hard psych, grungy guitar, and indie tendencies of those albums toward more formal song and compositional structures, as well as the far-flung experimentalist and improvisational frontiers that made them legends…

The ongoing Motorpsycho archaeology project, which began with a 4CD box set based on 1994 breakthrough album Timothy’s Monster, sidesteps the band’s detour into country rock with The Tussler to pick up the trail with 1995’s Blissard. This new 4CD set contains the original album plus contemporaneous EPs, stray cuts, studio experimentation, and an entire, previously unreleased album…

The third Motorpsycho full length marks an important step for the band, both in terms of musical ambition and execution. The previous album Demon Box was a very diverse album but it could still largely be tagged as a metal/stoner album. With Timothy's Monster, the band found a more personal mix of heavy indie rock with psychedelic experimentation that fans probably identify as psychonaut-rock…

Perhaps the band's defining statement, Trust Us marks the end of their sequence of deep, dark psychedelic rock albums in the late 1990s. This mammoth double album boasts the epic and emotional 'Vortex Surfer' as well as other 'psycho classics like '577', 'Ozone' and 'Hey Jane', mixing tightly formulated songwriting and epic psych-riffing improvisation.

Considering the tight run of albums since the first part of the Gullvåg Trilogy in 2017 – three double and a single album in less than four years – the 16 months wait for Ancient Astronauts must feel like an eternity for the fans. Much of the music continue in the manner of the band’s popular long form “N.O.X.” suite from “The All Is One” (2019) album, including “Mona Lisa/Azrael” and “Chariot of The Sun”, the latter clocking in at 22 minutes, being the band´s longest instrumental track to date. Most of Ancient Astronauts was recorded in Amper Tone studio in Oslo during five days in August with old compadre Deathprod at the helm.

Hard times call for big riffs. Following closely on the heels of the band's last album from 2020, Kingdom Of Oblivion swings further back toward the heavier Motorpsychodelia of Heavy Metal Fruit while still pushing forward in characteristic style.