Motorpsycho: Here Be Monsters

An immersive, blissed out, Floyd-like trip.

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For the past 25 years, Motorpsycho have been making epic and occasionally challenging music that leapfrogs easy categorisation but can and does include nods to Pink Floyd, jazz guitar, folk and heavy metal, sometimes all in the same song. And if that sounds like a mess then it’s anything but.

Here Be Monsters – which started life as a commission for the centennial jubilee of the Norwegian Technical Museum! – may be less guitar-driven than their previous work, but it’s a veritable behemoth of sounds.

Washes of keyboards, a thunderous tattooing of drums and great, empty atmospheric spaces make for an inestimable, all-consuming listen, not least in the fragile-sounding Lacuna/Sunrise and the roiling I.M.S.

Philip Wilding
Philip Wilding

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.