Motorpsycho

[I won't spend more than a couple of lines on the opening act, Italy's OJM, purveyors of a hard rock streaked with stoner influences that came across as dull, sloppy and pretty much pointless]

This is my fourth live experience with the Norwegians Motorpsycho. The first surprise on this sweltering Rimini evening (though the venue is mercifully air-conditioned) is the stage: bare, stripped-down, no trace of the thousand instruments and little gadgets that had crowded the platform on their last tours; Motorpsycho are back in their original lineup, the power trio, with no frills to pad out the sound made by bass, guitar and drums.

The Velvet is a good venue, but the acoustics aren't always great, and the insane volumes the Trondheim trio have accustomed us to certainly won't help, I suspect, the clarity of the sound. But so be it, better to just accept it: what awaits us is two hours of uncompromising rock and roll, a show built entirely around the harder side of their vast repertoire, with which the three seem to want to turn back the clock a little, to before the "pop" of their recent albums took hold of their instruments and steered them toward sounds and arrangements far removed from the sonic chaos that made them known, if not exactly famous, in the mid-90s; all the more so since, with no new album to support, the setlist can be chosen with no regard for commercial logic whatsoever.

The opening, in truth, is a Neil Young-style (an artist the trio love) revisiting of one of their little-known acoustic tracks, released only on an EP, "Wishing Well": as stripped-down and lo-fi as the original was, this new version is just as electric and stretched-out (around ten minutes), slow, bluesy and flirtatious, pleasant enough but not entirely convincing – not helped, as mentioned, by a sound still in need of calibration.

Next comes, with hardly anyone seeming to notice, an equally little-known and older track, also tucked away at the end of an EP, "Mad Sun": fast but emotional and melancholy indie rock, a beautiful song that few in the now-sizeable crowd seem to recognize, perhaps because many new fans have come to know the band through their recent albums. Bent Saether (bass and vocals), sporting a Jesus Christ look – very long hair, big white shirt, long beard – smiles, mutters "You might know the next one" and kicks off "Starmelt/Lovelight", one of the band's live warhorses. For many, the concert really starts here: the front rows erupt into pogo and sing-along, and the atmosphere finally takes off; no matter that the next track is a new song (Motorpsycho have a habit of debuting unreleased material live), a power-pop number in the vein of "Neverland", the track from their latest album "It's A Love Cult". The band will need to be careful when they record it: weighed down by a glossy production like that of their recent albums, the song could end up genuinely dull, while a rawer sound would definitely make it enjoyable... we'll see, the new album should be out in spring.

Meanwhile comes the first real tour de force: "Hogwash", from their very first album "Lobotomizer", has forcefully returned to the setlists of recent years, shedding the distinctly seventies sound of its original version and hardening into a psych-stoner charge. The only concession in the show to the psychedelic tones that characterized the band in the late 90s is the track's central improvisation, spacey and rarefied; for the rest, a dozen hypnotic, crushingly heavy minutes, with Saether's bass hammering away, Snah's guitar thick and saturated, alternating riffs with slow, noisy solos, and Gebhardt's drums pounding the crash cymbals like a good student of Keith Moon.

It's great to watch these three big, hairy, bearded guys (well, at least the two guitarists, since the drummer as usual sports very short hair) look at each other in search of connection, having fun and improvising even to the point of twisting the songs' structures (jazz is another of the trio's passions, and you can see it when, during a solo, Bent signals to Snah, via the bass, the key he's about to steer the song's development toward).

And then a knockout one-two: the band first digs up "In The Family", a masterpiece from "Angels And Daemons At Play" too long neglected live, and then even "Wearing Yr Smell", from "Timothy's Monster", an indie pop song whose immediacy and wry melancholy never fail to hit home. The crowd explodes, and for anyone who loves Motorpsycho's music, getting the chance to hear these two songs live is a genuinely unexpected treat. The sound is now much more bearable, the trio are clearly having fun, the songs are gorgeous, the crowd responds in kind; and even when, right on cue, the aforementioned earworm "Neverland" arrives — a fun but hardly essential track — the atmosphere stays warm and it's impossible not to enjoy the trio's sound. These three really do play, and how: watching Bent's fingers glide over the bass weaving intricate patterns while he belts it out at the mic is quite an experience.

After this rock onslaught, the band needs to catch its breath ("We're going to slow it down... not so much, just a bit," they tell us): "Greener", a down-tempo number loaded with big guitars from "Blissard", is another track that had long been missing from the setlists (though in this case the revival maybe wasn't essential...), but the effect is to cool things down a bit too much, with the fatigue of a truly blistering previous half hour also starting to show.

The following "Bonnie Lee", another unreleased song, is a pleasant surprise instead, bodes well for the upcoming record, falls in line with the hard sound of the preceding tracks and unveils a pounding first half followed by a melodic second half built on a very effective dynamic crescendo. And finally, to close the first set, Motorpsycho dust off "The Wheel". A quarter of an hour of martial pacing, at least ten minutes hammering away on a single chord, a layering of sound that builds to a jaw-dropping crescendo (personally, I thought at least three times that the dynamics had already been pushed to the max, only to be proven wrong by the next surge...): devastating, no two ways about it. A punch in the face that's hard to forget, especially considering there were only three people on that stage!

When Motorpsycho play at being Motorpsycho they have no equal, and "The Wheel" is one of the most representative songs in their catalogue, or at least in that of the band's early years.

The ritual exit from the stage, the ritual crowd recall, the ritual return of the band. The three have no intention of giving anyone a break and come back even meaner than before: "Uberwagner", stripped of all the keyboards and horns that dress it up on record, becomes a highly effective stoner-pop number, thanks to the gloriously off-kilter vocal line that counterbalances a squared-off rhythmic pattern; the Neu!-style rhythms that mark the original are buried under tons of watts. Even heavier is the following "Vanishing Point" from the mini-LP "Barracuda", a hard rock track bordering on parody of the genre, screamed and pummeled within an inch of its life.

But it's with "You Lied", aka "Walking On The Water" (the third track drawn from "Angels And Daemons", against just one from "Blissard" and none at all from "Trust Us" or "Let Them Eat Cake"!) that the show reaches its climax. Four minutes of relentless, syncopated rhythm, with a bass riff as classic as it is effective, and a chorus practically built to be screamed at the top of one's lungs (Bent regularly stops to let the crowd sing): more than enough to send the audience wild as if the show had just begun. And to close things out in style, the band even fires off "Loaded", a viciously violent hardcore track complete with raw screams, taken from "3 Songs For Ruth", an EP from way back in 1991: as if to say, the years go by but we don't feel them. Absolutely vicious, maybe too much so... perhaps the only flaw of the show was that, after an hour and a half running full throttle, a bit of atmosphere to wind things down would have been welcome (and I say this because I know Motorpsycho are just as capable of delivering emotion by slowing down and thinning things out).

The close, after another exit from the stage, is entrusted to another classic, "Feel", performed with Bent on guitar and vocals and Snah and Gebhardt replacing the mellotron with backing vocals that are tender if nothing else; and the whole crowd sings along in unison, repeating the miracle this band has been pulling off on stages across Europe for ten years now: with no advertising coverage worth mentioning, relying practically just on word of mouth, Motorpsycho are able to draw (and move) small, adoring crowds who sing their songs in unison as if the Rolling Stones were the ones on stage. Miracles of rock'n'roll.

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