Fricke’s Picks: Motorpsycho “Suite: Little Lucid Moments,” the opening track on Little Lucid Moments (Rune Grammofon), by the Norwegian power trio Motorpsycho, is not little. It is a mini-album in itself, an improbable union over four parts and 21 minutes of Tool, Goo-era Sonic Youth and the ‘69 Yes: angular riffing, volcanic guitar-bass-drums debate and surprising pop-sheen vocal harmonies. The second section is well named — “A Hoof to the Head” — and the gripping tumult in the third stretch, “Hallucifuge (Hyperrealistically Speaking),” explains why Motorpsycho are established prog-metal stars abroad. Bassist-singer Bent Saether and guitarist-singer Hans Magnus Ryan started the band in 1989, taking the name from Russ Meyer’s 1965 biker-gang B movie and throwing caution to the arctic winds over a long discography of hard-rock indulgence, including the two-CD epics Trust Us (1998) and Black Hole/Blank Canvas (2006). Little Lucid Moments — a single disc, and Saether and Ryan’s first album with new drummer Kenneth Kapstad — is pith in comparison, but just barely. The finale, “The Alchemyst,” is a 12-minute whirl of power-pop clang and polyrhythmic jamming with a soft space choir landing at the end. You wouldn’t want it any shorter. [Photo: Anja Basma]
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Published: 2008-06-04
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Fricke's Picks
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Fricke’s Picks: Porcupine Tree, the Future Kings of England and the Raspberries The Art of Nightmares Porcupine Tree – the long-running British progressive-rock band founded and commanded by singer-guitarist-composer Steven Wilson – are rare in their field: obsessed not with fantasy but the death of it, particularly in children. At a recent head-trip gig at New York’s Beacon Theatre, films of sickly-white preteen zombies – hypnotized by computer screens, gulping medication, brandishing handguns – were projected on a screen behind Wilson during his tangled distortion-bomb riffing in the long title track of the recent album, Fear of a Blank Planet (Atlantic), and the record’s even longer centerpiece nightmare, “Anesthetize.” A schoolgirl ran amok in what looked like a ruined psych ward during the convulsive title instrumental from the group’s new EP, Nil Recurring (Transmission). Wilson started Porcupine Tree in 1987 as a home-studio experiment that has since evolved, live and on an extensive series of records, into an aggressively modern merger of Rush’s arena art rock, U.K. prog classicism – especially Pink Floyd’s eulogies to madness and King Crimson’s angular majesty – and the postgrunge vengeance of Tool. There are no dragons evident on Fear of a Blank Planet or Nil Returning. But there are plenty of demons. And King Crimson guitarist-sage Robert Fripp plays on both records, an impeccable seal of approval. New Royal Freaks Witches and fiends run riot through the lyrics and instrumental vapors of the six extended tracks on The Fate of Old Mother Orvis (Backwater), by the Future Kings of England. The audaciously named British band’s mix of art rock and freak folk is also rife with other specters – the pastoral Floyd, ’72 Genesis, the echosoup psychedelia of Amon Düül II – whipped together with an ardor that sounds like yesterday and tomorrow at once. Seventies Rock Candy Hard and sweet, the Raspberries were never the second coming of the Beatles. They were, in the early Seventies, and still are – based on a show I just saw by the original li
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Published: 2007-11-08
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Fricke's Picks
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