Motorpsycho
The Crucible RUNE GRAMMOFON
Viking veterans head for the
prog stars.
Motorpsycho
are a Norwegian
institution,
revered for
virtuoso hard-
rock heaviness leavened by jazz-
like intricacy and expansive
concepts. This loosely linked
follow-up to their 2017 double
album The Tower is a more
compact prog suite, with stylistic
switches that would send lesser
bands tumbling to their doom.
Psychotzar, for example, is pure
Sabbath in its pummelling metal
riffs and sense of doomy ritual,
until it becomes sinisterly
acoustic. The album hinges on
Lux Aeterna (named after part of
the Requiem Mass). Beginning as
a sylvan meditation, it swells
into a gorgeous statement of
transcendence from earthly
pains into the bliss of
“a multiverse left to explore”.
Van der Graaf Generator at their
most unforgivingly knotty and
black-hole heavy come to mind,
only to be left trailing as the
music launches into a hyper-
speed dimension all its own.
Motorpsycho are lately
exploring familiar fields, from
Neil Young’s Laurel Canyon to
Led Zeppelin’s rustic mysticism,
with fresh eyes. There’s a sort of
crazy idealism to their music
which brings them tantalisingly
close to such sources, while
becoming increasingly
indomitably themselves.
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Nick HastedDead Witches
The Final Exorcism
HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS
If you’re reading this, you’re
already dead.
The Final
Exorcism is the
second dose of
appropriately
lumbering
occult doom from Electric
Wizard drummer Mark
Greening and a revolving coven
of Oliver Reed-worshipping
creeps. Very clearly the highlight
is the nausea-inducing death
wobble of When Do the Dead See
The Sun. Terrifying and hilarious
in equal measure, it’s
a delightfully brutal stab at
dystopian psychedelia that
sounds like an angry mob
dragging a battered Donovan
down a gravel road by his neck.
Vocalist Soozi Chamaleone went
so far out on this one she’ll
probably never get home. It’sJim Jones & The
Righteous Mind
CollectiV MASONIC
pretty amazing. Also of note is
the sinister eight-minute dirge
Goddess Of The Night, which
climaxes in a creaky organ riff
that sounds like Dr Phibes after
chugging a fistful of Rohypnol.
Elsewhere it’s an inescapable
tangle of impressively extreme
fuzz and lots of lurching around
the dungeon, vomiting green
blood and bashing on the stone
walls at a turtle’s pace.
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SleazegrinderMaximo Park
As Long As We
Keep Moving COOKING VINYL
Audience-less live set puts the
obsessive in the room.
As fans of men
in bowler hats
doing star-
jumps and
reciting lyrics
from books will tell you,
Newcastle indie punk poets
Maximo Park are one of alt.
rock’s most riveting live bands,
so naturally they’re keen to
capture their live lightning in an
often-inadequate mp3 bottle.
In 2006 they released a live
album and DVD recorded at the
Brixton and Newcastle
Academies. For this follow-up
they sacrifice audience roar for
decent audio quality, and have
recorded a batch of album tracks
and less celebrated singles live in
the studio. The song selection
will cause obsessives their
customary consternation
(“What Means Love? but no
Nosebleed?!”), and the method
is double-edged; there’s an
intimate clarity to the record that
draws the listener into the room,
but has a strong air of Marc Riley
session too. Still, indie rock riots
like Girls Who Play Guitars and
Limassol are pumped with gig-
worthy passion, Get High (No
I Don’t) buzzes with anti-narcotic
bass menace and Midnight On
The Hill and a stratospheric
Questing, Not Coasting highlight
a brace of Maximo’s more
spectacular obscurities. Rough
poetry in motion.
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Mark BeaumontTedeschi Trucks
Band
Signs SNAKEFARM/FANTASY
Susan Tedeschi. Derek Trucks.
And their Band.
Four albums in,
married couple
Tedeschi and
Trucks are at
the forefront of
the latest blues-rock boom.
They’re a guaranteed US Top 20Sonic call for unity from primal rocker.
T
he sight of societies everywhere
tearing down the middle, as if
collectively suffering more than
19 nervous breakdowns, has inspired
Jim Jones to jam all the disparate
music he cares about on to one unity
candidate of an LP. Brexiteer or
Remainer, gospel shouter or garage-
punk, he seems to be saying: “Why can’t
we all just get along?”
Two of Jones’s compadres from Thee
Hypnotics, the recently reunited, Sub
Pop-signed garage band which made his
name in the 80s and 90s, drop in, and
Keith Richards’s 1964 Gibson
Hummingbird is borrowed. The latter
may be responsible for opener Sex Doll’s
brassily exultant, Exile On Main St-tinged
choruses. The song elsewhere resembles
Kick Out The Jams if shoved into a state of
still less intelligible ecstasy. The riffs are
thunderous, the sound in the room
gigantic, and Jones’s voice a panting
definition of crazed carnality.
A whole album of this sort of
bludgeoning seedy rock’n’roll would be
more than alright. Jones’s range with the
Righteous Mind – which he has sought to
extend since his previous, more
rockabilly-focused band the Jim Jones
Revue ran out of steam – allows far more.
There’s the diseased gospel holler ofI Found A Love, which dissolves into
a gargle recalling The Exorcist’s vomit-
prone Regan, as if uniting heaven and hell.
The undead croon and spectral pedal-steel
of the sultry country-soul epic Meth Church
is still more effective, sounding genuinely
damaged. Going There Anyway, a parched
country ballad about a cliff-top crisis
point, then finds twisted romance in ‘the
way you stand so close to quicksand’. This
variety never slows the album’s constant
state of attack. If anything it increases the
impact of the singer’s jowl-shaking, balls-
out commitment.
From the moment that Jones first rose
up from the fantasised badlands of Thee
Hypnotics’ Buckinghamshire home, he
has always stood four-square not only
behind the sonic touchstones of the MC5
and the Birthday Party, but also for the
idea of rock as an idealised community.
His recent campaigning to save our
threatened grass-roots venues promoted
them as shrines to independent culture,
calling them “the headquarters of the
resistance”. CollectiV is another aspect of
that attitude. Put all the theorising to one
side, and you still have a man born with
the gift of a sandpaper voice, which seems
to shred itself afresh with every word.
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Nick Hasted84 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
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