Barely 16 months after the release of the pastoral “Kingdom of Oblivion”, Motorpsycho are back with a new album (their 24th or 21st depending on how you count).
Motorpsycho is a band that has gone through more musical changes than most other bands during their career since their debut in 1991 with Lobotomizer.
From their humble beginnings with death metal-like vocals and riff-based indie rock, they have made their way through the “pop phase” with Let Them Eat Cake (2000) and Phaerothyme (2001) via stoner rock and classic 70s prog from Heavy Metal Fruit (2009).
They later moved on to the experimental and multifaceted The Gullvåg Trilogy (2017-2020), which was in many ways the crowning glory of the band’s 31-year lifespan.
And throughout all these years, Motorpsycho has been relentlessly uncompromising in their approach to music. They do whatever they please, regardless of musical trends or what the fans expect from them or want them to do. The chances that the band will someday return to the lighter and more accessible style from the 90s now seem negligible.
As previously mentioned, from 2010 and the album «Heavy Metal Fruit», Motorpsycho have followed their own idea and vision of prog rock so consistently that they have now long since created their own particular brand of prog that sits somewhere between early Black Sabbath, King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator. But despite all these sources of inspiration, Motorpsycho in 2022 only sounds like Motorpsycho – an almost indefinable genre in itself.
Ancient Astronauts continues the “pastoral prog” phase that started with last year’s Kingdom of Oblivion. The album has only four songs, the longest of which lasts 22 minutes and the shortest just under two minutes. Nevertheless, Ancient Astronauts does not feel any less epic than The Tower, the double album that started «The Gullvåg Trilogy.
The Ladder and Flower of Awareness can almost be considered appetizers before the main course. In this context, they feel like anecdotes in the context of Motorpsycho.
The main course here are the last two tracks, Mona Lisa/azrael and Chariot Of The Sun – To Phaeton On The Occasion Of Sunrise (Theme From An Imagined Movie). Two «songs» that contain more elements, stages, movements and dynamic shifts than even Yes was able to achieve on Tales from Topographic Oceans.
In many ways, this is Motorpsycho at their most inaccessible, but also at their most ambitious and uncompromising.
And in case you were wondering, the title Ancient Astronauts refers to a pseudoscientific hypothesis that holds that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times.
Far out, man.
Frode Singsaas | Now Spinning Magazine
