MOTORPSYCHO - The Death Defying Unicorn

By now Motorpsycho are fully immersed in a progressive trip. Not that they'd never embraced the genre before, quite the opposite... it's just that with "The Death Defying Unicorn" they reach a level of pomp and ambition that would be hard to replicate, helped along by the presence of the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and Ola Kvernberg on violin.

Initially commissioned by the Molde International Jazzfestival for its fiftieth anniversary celebrations and later rearranged and polished up, under the supervision of Kåre Chr. Vestrheim (already co-producer of the previous "Heavy Metal Fruit"), the "work" (it seems more fitting to call it that...) opens with the chamber dance of "Out Of the Woods", before diving, without a break, into the tumultuous trajectories of "The Hollow Lands", where the fairy-tale and the heavy go hand in hand, fused into a single, rock-solid psycho-prog block.

An insistent huddle of horns, on the other hand, opens the more measured and adventurous "Through The Veil", into which the Orchestra's sparkling orchestrations are woven.

The album – which also features, among others, Ståle Storløkken of Supersilent – certainly has its share of interesting moments, but it isn't free of sterile instrumental stretches that are something of a mixed blessing in a work that tries to stay balanced between evocativeness and rawness, to the point of splitting its own soul in two, as shown by "Into The Gyre", whose atmosphere is first converted into a jazz-rock chase and then resolved into a mysterious cosmic coda.

Then again, ambition can also lead toward solutions that verge on the cloying (take, for instance, the grandiloquent invocation of "Oh Proteus – A Prayer" or the tiptoeing chamber textures of "Sharks") or that amount to a lot of noise about nothing (the rocky, hardelic "Mutiny", whose violin lines can't help but recall Jean-Luc Ponty's "flights").

Still, passages like "La Lethe" (a long odyssey of the damned that seems to echo certain pages from the Carla Bley/Paul Haines duo) or the Seventies-prog triumph of "Into The Mystic" definitely weigh in the album's favour, so one can turn a blind eye...

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11/02/2012