Description
This is the latest installment in Motorpsychos ongoing series of live documents Roadwork. It was recorded across Europe over a three-year period spanning 2008-2010, and is the first live record released featuring the Snah/Beny/Kenneth line-up of the band. As finding a complete show fit for release proved difficult, and modern technology makes it real easy to fake a chronology that would work well from a listeners point of view, Roadwork vol 4: Intrepid Skronk is a collection of moments from the last several tours Motorpsychos undertaken since Kenneth Kapstad joined on drums in 2007, and features material from all phases of their career.
The previous installment in this series, vol 3: the four norsemen of the apocalypse released as part of the Haircuts DVD in 2007, was a recording of the Snah/Bent/Geb/Baard line-up of the band recorded at the Paradiso in Amsterdam in 2003. It documented a band disintegrating from ceaseless touring and ever increasing differences of ambition: flaming out, but still bravly trying to and in parts actually managing to connect with the muse. Lets just say the tension is tangible. This is a different cup of tea.
This is a living, breathing muscle-car of a rock band in full flight, stretching the limits of their imaginations (and sometimes the patience of their audience!) by going some place new as often as possible creating a new collective identity for themselves and the reimagening the material in the focus of the two volumes and the series as a whole is the same though: the improvising rock band. The versions of the songs contained herein all have one thing in common: they are all really different from the studio incarnations of themselves. All is Loneliness, an acoustic five minute hymn in its original state on Demon Box (1993), is here an eighteen minute electric behemoth sloutching towards eh, Haarlem (?) to be born anew. The somewhat stilted orchestral psych version of Landslide from the 2002 Phanerothyme album, has become something altogether more organic and jazzy here, and Arnie Hassles kozmic kayaking escapades from last years Heavy Metal Fruit had grown into epic proportions by the time it hit Leipzig last summer.
Its this kind of reinvention that is the focus of everything going on here, and although the adrenalin wins out in places and the kinetic energy the boys amass sometimes becomes almost too much for them to handle, the power trios antics makes for an exciting listen. Riding the tiger indeed, the band sometimes tethers on the brink of fusion, jazzrock, and other unentartete forms, but mostly manages to rein in the beast on the right side of taste. Mostly. Intrepid Skronk is therefore an apt description of this music, and if that doesnt scare you off and you keep your ears open, you might discover something in these grooves that you never thought a rock record would provide.
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