Uploaded to Aural Innovations June 2006
Norway's Motorpsycho took a couple of years off and did their Tussler country western music thing as well as other musical things and in the process lost original drummer Geb. The band has recently released a new double CD and is on tour. I have seen every tour since 1998 and was interested to see what this tour would be like. I had been checking out the set lists at the Motorpsycho web site fan forum but this was only the fifth show on the tour and they change their sets a lot and played on average 35-50 different songs on a tour, which makes it interesting to go to more than one show on a tour (more bands should do this but they are too lazy to put in the preparation that is necessary, despite many bands having plenty of material!).
Anyway, I met up with some MP fans from Germany and my friend Anders for a beer and then we headed over to the ROCK. The place was pretty packed. The opening act, the River Phoenix, started at around 9:30 and played for 45 minutes or so. They had a few cool songs (3 guitarists - only one ever played anything interesting) but too many of their songs had the same formula. Start slow and build up to this wall of sound thing. Some of their songs for sure had a MP influence so I can see how they were a reasonable choice for an opening act.
Anyway, MP started at 11 and played all the way until 1:00 and no encore. The band played most of the new album and a few older tracks but they were clearly going for something different on this tour, feeling out the two new members (Former 7zuma7 drummer and vibraphone player). They were adventurous for sure and played some really cool jams and played a heavy set. I have never seen them play this heavy (I expected the new CD to be much heavier but it is not, the new songs just come across more heavy!). They had a few sort of jazzy like jams and also just hard rocking jams with some ripping it up guitar. It was a good mixture of new and old but not quite enough old tracks. The band have been making up for that later on the tour by playing longer sets with more older material but it was the heavy metal disco at 1, so the band had to stop, sadly. Great show.
Set list: Critical Mass, Sail On,Triggerman, In Our Tree, Neverland, No Evil, Hej Jane, Kill Devil Hills, Hyena, Coalmine Pony, Bonny Lee, PreWheel Jam> The Wheel>Plan #1