Staff pick of the week...
This week...Jim picks it!

Artist: Motorpsycho Title: It's A Love Cult Price: $13.25 CD	Tracks on this CD:
	Überwagner Or A Billion Bubbles In My Mind
	Circles
	Neverland
	The Otherness
	Carousel
	What If...
	The Mirror and the Lie
	Serpentine
	Custer's Last Stand (One More Daemon
	Composite Head

Swaggering, soulful rock, jazzy pop, nimble prog, and acid-drizzled psychedelic from Terrastock faves, Motorpsycho (named after a Russ Meyer film), a superpowerful power trio from Trondheim, Norway. Yet another amazing Scandinavian band who have been around for more than a decade and release an album every year or so. Rather essential for a band of this magnitude, latitude, and um, progitude. Can influences as diverse as The Zombies and Zeppelin, Love and Queens Of The Stoneage, The Green Pajamas and The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, The Beach Boys and The Allman Brothers coexist? Why Yes…hohoho…they can. It’s what Motorpsycho is all about. Furthermore, to compare and contrast a few of my favorite bands, riddle me this: If The Soundtrack Of Our Lives are the classic rock resurrectionists of Scandinavia, and The Bear Quartet Sweden’s fierce and fey proto-pop overlords, then are Norway’s Motorpsycho not their hippy, trippy, California-meets-Krautrock cousins? And fans of TSOOL and The BQ might often find recent recordings by Motorpsycho orbiting somewhere in between… Except on the prog rock front where Motorpsycho and Pluto have a lot in common. Far out!

A kaleidoscopic set of songs released in 2002, their most recent masterpiece, ‘It’s A Love Cult’, opens with the motorik Neu! pulse of “Uberwagner, or a Billion Bubbles In my Mind”, an awe-inspiring neo-kosmiche space-rock sojourn. Once your brain is billion bubbled you can lie there, paralyzed by joy, and enjoy the rest of the album. The jazzist pop of “The Otherness”, the anthemic ass-shaking of “Neverland” and the highwire no-net tension of “Serpentine”. So good, you’ll be picking up the pieces of your mynd, your heart, and your soul for weeks, and you’ll need some more Motorpsycho to glue it all back together. I love it… Reviewers love them too:

“Their yearly waxings still manage to encapsulate their dazzling spectrum of psych rock sound: West Coast pop, Sonic Youth, post-Rubber Soul Beatles, Blue Afternoon-era Tim Buckley, all ages of Floyd. While there’s plenty of history here, it’s always re-envisaged by fresh eyes… Motorpsycho have got the musical chops, they’ve got a brilliant, bizarre way with songcraft (think Super Furries) all they require is your attention.” [MOJO]…

“Weighty eclecticism from hyperactive Norse rockers. You could no more get a handle on Norway’s Motorpsycho than you could a runaway trainthey veer from quirky psychedelia (“Neverland”) and fey folk misery (“Circles”) to Flaming Lips-style Barnum & Bailey art rock (“Überwagner Or A Billion Bubbles In My Mind”). [NME]…

“Trondheim [Norway]’s beloved psychedelic-pop trio mirror Soundtrack Of Our Lives’ baroque intentions, but softened with ‘70s West Coast dreaminess and ‘60s bubblegum zippiness. Less kaftan rock, then, more a grown-up Supergrass. Even their retro shapes (Neverland is the song the Austin Powers soundtracks forgot) rip along fine, while Custer’s Last Stand sweetens their thrashier origins. A jazzy, sun-fried This Otherness, however, is where Motorpsycho come into their own…not groundbreaking, but galvanising all the same.” [Q Magazine]…