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LITTLE LUCID MOMENTS

Motorpsycho

Eclectic Prog


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Motorpsycho Little Lucid Moments album cover
4.00 | 131 ratings | 5 reviews | 28% 5 stars

Excellent addition to any
prog rock music collection

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Studio Album, released in 2008

Songs / Tracks Listing

1. Suite: Little Lucid Moments (21:10):
- a) Lawned (Consciousness Causes Collapse)
- b) A Hoof to the Head
- c) Hallucifuge (Hyperrealistically Speaking...)
- d) Sweet Oblivion / Perfect Sense
2. Year Zero (A Damage Report) (11:20)
3. She Left on the Sun Ship (14:30)
4. The Alchemyst (12:30)

Total Time: 59:30

Line-up / Musicians

- Bent Sæther / vocals, bass, guitars, keyboards
- Hans Magnus "Snah" Ryan / guitars, vocals, keyboards
- Kenneth Kapstad / drums

With:
- Jørgen Træen / Fx, mixing

Note: The actual instrumentation could not be fully confirmed at this moment

Releases information

Artwork: Kim Hiorthøy

CD Rune Grammofon RCD 2073 (2008 Norway)
2LP Stickman Records PSYCHOBABBLE 060 (2008 Germany)
2LP Rune Grammofon RLP 3073 (2008 Norway)
CD Stickman Records PSYCHOBABBLE 060 (2008 Germany)
CD P-Vine Records PVCP-8255 (2008 Japan)

Thanks to windhawk for the addition
and to Quinino for the last updates
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MOTORPSYCHO Little Lucid Moments ratings distribution


4.00
(131 ratings)
Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music(28%)
28%
Excellent addition to any prog rock music collection(47%)
47%
Good, but non-essential (21%)
21%
Collectors/fans only (4%)
4%
Poor. Only for completionists (0%)
0%

MOTORPSYCHO Little Lucid Moments reviews


Showing all collaborators reviews and last reviews preview | Show all reviews/ratings

Collaborators/Experts Reviews

Review by Bonnek
SPECIAL COLLABORATOR Honorary Collaborator
4 stars Great! Any day now we'll get to review Sonic Youth on PA!

In the meantime we will have to do with this bunch of adventurous alternative rockers from Norway. I have only a scattered knowledge of the band, gathered by picking up a few of their albums from the library over the last 15 years. (Yes, this band has been around for a while already). Due to their addition to PA I picked up this album and it will sure fire my interest again.

The 21 minute opening track starts with 5 minutes of pure Sonic Youth delight: a rough, rocking, catchy and shattering flood of guitar dissonance. They add a short post rock interlude before heading into the next surge of "sonic rock" around the 6.30 minute mark. As a fan of the end 80's US guitar rock, there is nothing really new here, but these guys know their game and have the skill to take it to new levels of excellence. In fact, they sound as fresh and enthusiastic as if they had just invented rock themselves. They keep the song going with inspired psychedelic jamming and a focused and honest energy.

Year Zero is quite different. More post rock influences here but not those of the endlessly stretched kind. They build up a soft melancholic song with very fragile vocals that remind me a bit of J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr). The song concludes with a great slow-paced guitar jam that mixes their noisy post rock sound with a proggy stateliness.

With She Left On The Sun Trip they sound like the Motorpsycho I remember from the earlier albums I've heard from them. This track is rocking, exploratory, psychedelic and heavy. It has the Motorpsycho quality of being both catchy and challengingly disharmonious. The second half brings a mesmerizing guitar ambience full of hypnotizing sounds. This is what post-rock should sound like!

The Alchemyst starts as a more traditional indie rock song, spiced with enough sophistication to remain interesting, it settles for a great Hawkwind groove in the second half. Especially that part of the song convinces with its steady rhythm, pulsating bass and washes of sound effects. The last minutes offer a great wall of sound with a distinct flavour of prog-noise abundance.

Little Lucid Moments is a brilliant guitar rock album with nothing but stellar music. I easily rates a solid 4 stars with potential for more, to be reassessed when I've heard some more of their albums. For all fans of the best indie rock, guitar rock, psychedelic rock, kraut rock, rock rock and other rock.

Review by FragileKings
PROG REVIEWER
3 stars Sometimes I like to look at the "Popular Artists (Top 50, Last 24h)" on the PA homepage to see if there are any bands with intriguing names I haven't heard of that I might want to check out. This has been a great way of discovering new music for me and I have added more than a few CDs to my collection doing this.

Motorpsycho's "Little Lucid Moments" ended up in my stacks this way. I had never heard of them and after looking over their their discography and getting a general idea of what they might sound like and which albums were the better rated ones, I checked out Amazon and ordered this album because it was a little cheaper than some of the higher rated albums.

Let me drop in some personal history here as around 1992 I was introduced to a Canadian band called Sloan who had released an independent EP and a major label debut around that time. Their style was unabashedly derivative of My Bloody Valentine, whose work I had never heard, and I loved the harmony vocals and pretty melodies contrasted by the high distortion, white noise style of music. For their second album they turned down the fuzz tone and concentrated more on song writing but there was still something alternative in their approach to music. Several years later I borrowed two CDs from a friend, one by Sonic Youth and one by Pavement (plus I had bought a My Bloody Valentine CD as well). And so I was introduced to the so-called shoegaze style.

I always believed that it was a short-lived style of music that lasted a few years from the end of the 80's to somewhere near the mid-90's, and so it was quite a surprise to listen to this album for the first time (since I had bought this as a total experiment) because it was just like listening to those bands once more, except this was from a more recent time period.

Progressive shoegaze? Why not? Actually, I can't really say why it's progressive because it is not prog in the way that I normally hear it. "Suite: Little Lucid Moments" is 21 minutes long and goes through different parts, changing style as it does. It begins in the Sonic Youth / Sloan vein but a few minutes in, it changes gears for the second part and suddenly sounds like Foo Fighters. That's OK with me. I used to like them, too. So now it seems I can indulge in the guilty treat of listening to a band that's listed on PA but sounds like a lot of stuff I used to listen to in the early 90's, long before I ever knew what progressive rock was. Incidentally, except for the lackluster space guitar part that comes up during this 21-minute voyage of sound, this has become on of the more enjoyable 20-minute plus epics that joined my collection this year.

I'm afraid "Year Zero (A Damage Report)" hasn't offered my anything to grab onto yet. It maintains the style of the album but for me the vocals are weak and the music doesn't have much to keep my interest. That's not so bad though because the next two songs are vying for my pick as favourite on the album.

Both "She Left on the Sun Ship" and "The Alchemist" have some catchy moments and nice atmospheric parts that seem to indicate how shoegaze morphed into postrock. I'm surprised at how simple the musical arrangement is. This is vocals (two lead vocalists I can hear), guitars (two distinct sounds), bass, and drums. There doesn't seem to be a lot of overdubs. I feel these guys could play this album live with only the inclusion of someone on bass or guitar to make up the fourth member.

I guess this album is considered progressive rock because the longer compositions permit the musicians to let each song travel through different sonic expressions from cosmic space guitar to aggressive Foo Fighter style, to lighter melodic shoegaze rock, to atmospheric post rock. Motorpsycho have taken what may have become an obsolete and non-trending style and washed the entire album over with it, making it sound as though it is as fresh and alive as it was in the early 90's. Though not as complex and technically advanced as the music of many great bands on this site, it stands out as a vibrant oddball. Some may not like it, but others will get its appeal.

Review by Dapper~Blueberries
PROG REVIEWER
5 stars After the highly ambitious album of Black Hole / Blank Canvas, Motorpsycho, 2 years later, would do hard work on their next outing, that being a highly prog rock sounding record that allowed to not only embrace their more progressive sentimentalities thoroughly, but also change entirely for the next half of their discography, and for the better, as for this record, Little Lucid Moments, they decided to go really big for what they wanted to do.

This album is composed of 4 really long songs, most notably the 21 minute epic of Suite: Little Lucid Moments, which comprises four parts that are all jams that intermingle within the band's more progressive frontiers. I'd say all of these songs are crafted in such a way that no matter how many listens I go through with this album, I never get bored. I think the band going for a huge and more jammy sound that bands like Hawkwind, and Amon Duul II composed in the 70s lets this breathe an entirely new life into Motorpsycho that I felt was highly needed since Blissard, but also in a way that feels very Motoresque.

The highlight for this album, for me, is the big epic. Just how they can make such a jammy and free form song into this glorious suite that takes homage with psych rock, space rock, prog rock, and krautrock, and not only merge them together in a seriously impressive and vibrant way, but also for them to play some seriously complicated music for so long is just impressive. I just love how this band can shape their sounds in such creative ways. Hell, I think a jam of this caliber may be the source of inspiration for many neo-psych bands like King Gizzard and Thee Oh Sees, as both those bands would go on to create huge jam epics like The Dripping Tap and Henchlock.

The other three tracks of Year Zero, She Left on the Sun Ship, and The Alchemyst are also extremely good in what they do with a more heavy psych rock structure. Heck, I think Year Zero, at the beginning, has some post rock ideology within it that sounds very much like Mogwai or Don Caballero. It just shows the band is more than a proggy psych rock band from Norway as they can do many more genres too.

There are some artists that slowly change their sounds to where their old one is non-existent, but I think Motorpsycho really does a good job in making their records feel entirely new whilst also showcasing their love for their more heavier sounds of the past. Little Lucid Moments shows that in spades, and shows that, while the band is away from their more grunge ideals of Lobotimizer and Demon Box, they are still the band to go for when you want those big meaty chords, or those powerful jams. It is the band's first ultimatum of a record since Timothy's Monster, and I think it is an essential record for any psych and prog rock fan. It may not be the longest in terms of tracklisting, but each song is their own gold mine of beautiful rubies and diamonds for you to spelunk your way through.

Review by BrufordFreak
COLLABORATOR Honorary Collaborator
4 stars Another year, another album from these ever-morphing chameleons of guitar-oriented rock--this one yet another celebration of the musics of old.

1. "Suite: Little Lucid Moments" (21:10) a very high-energy jam. (35.25/40): - a) "Lawned (Consciousness Causes Collapse)" - sounds like Echolyn with a little Beck mixed in there. The quiet section in the fifth minute is interesting and DOVES-like. (8.66667/10) - b) "A Hoof to the Head" - heavy bass and smashing, crashing drums with guitars set at maximum distorting with OZZIE-like vocals give this one a SABBATH-on-amphetamines feel. Again, DOVES, Some Cities-era, comes to mind. (8.75/10) - c) "Hallucifuge (Hyperrealistically Speaking...)" - pure Motorpsycho imitation 1960s psych rock jamming. Amazing play from the rhythm section with great blues-rockin' soloing over the top from the wailing lead guitar(s) at both ends and classic Motorpsycho/CSN&Y group vocal harmonies in the middle. (8.75/10) - d) "Sweet Oblivion / Perfect Sense" - the "Sweet Oblivion" part feels a bit more like an old instrumental jam from the likes of THE ALLMAN BROTHERS or but then the vocals return for a bit before everything switches into more of a slowed-down blues-rock jam--this one sounding even more like one of Dickey Betts and Duane Allman's classics. (9.125/10)

2. "Year Zero (A Damage Report)" (11:20) starts slowly, like an old-fashioned jam song, building upon one little guitar and bass riff, achieving full spectrum sound and volume by the middle of the fourth minute. I like the sound but this could get a little old. Suddenly, at 3:30, everything comes to a stop and the song becomes a simple Neil Young-like song--with a single singing voice giving this a very Neil Young-like sound and feel. This lasts until the six-minute mark when the guitars and drums ramp it up again (after the vocals have stopped). At 6:45 the vocals (now harmonized) rejoin amidst the loud soundscape but then the music suddenly cuts out again, replaced by a motif that alternates long spaces with three-strum three-chord power chords. After a few rounds of this, the music kicks back in--high octane--for a nice, long, "raunchy" guitar solo. The drumming and music and soloing are all good--especially if you love the long power jams at the end of ALLMAN BROTHERS or LYNYRD SKYNYRD songs. When the jam ends, there is a 40-second long "distant" (quiet) church organ sound taking us to the end. Okay. (17.333333/20)

3. "She Left on the Sun Ship" (14:30) opens with some angular guitar play that sounds like 1980s U2. When the vocals enter the sound enters something more akin to punk's RAMONES bordering on THE AMBITIOUS LOVERS, but then after the singing ends around 3:30 there is a definite return to that aggressive 1980s U2-ish sound. The slowed down sixth minute sees the band pairing up two guitarists to play off one another exactly like Dickey Betts and Duane Allman (and, later, Thin Lizzy's Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson)--even using twin interwoven melody lines that sound as if they're lifted from (and slightly varied) from music of the aforementioned guitar gods' original songs. The minimalist interweave of guitars and bass in the ninth minute is new--turning into something more akin to 1980s U2 in the tenth. This minimalist weave then continues to the song's end as the sound is manipulated from the engineering room into something more lysergic. A pretty decent jam song! (27/30)

4. "The Alchemyst" (12:30) spacey "distant horn"-like synths feel like they're prepping us for a deleted scene from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. After 90 seconds, guitars enter sounding like something from a DOVES or BILL NELSON album, but then the bass and cymbal-crashing drums. The fourth minute introduces another motif, this one sounding more like something from a 1980s band that's trying to stick more to rock principles--like maybe U2, The Stranglers, The Replacements, or even XTC or The Police. Those great Motorpsycho harmony vocals sing throughout, really hitting the spot. At 6:50 the music pauses as if the band is getting a start on a downhill descent down a steep rollercoaster. The guitar riff providing the glue that keeps the song rolling along gets a little tedious after three minutes. Great drumming all the way to the end of the "ride." Weird song whose parts do not necessarily all feel as if they belong (or work) together. (21.75/25)

Total Time: 59:30

An album of very blues-rock grungy sounding music that may intrigue and endear many hard rock holdovers from the 1960s while impressing only those who have the patience/tolerance for heavily-distorted guitar soundscapes.

B/four stars; an excellent collection of retro-blues-rock music drawing inspiration (and sound) from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (with a little 2000s thrown in for good measure). Highly recommended to any prog lover whose heart is strongly planted in the best psychedelic hard rock.

Latest members reviews

4 stars Another year, another Motorpsycho album. Not a double CD this time. But with average song lengths of 14 minutes. Talk about giantomania. Kidding aside, this is Motorpsycho not in their classic rock/heavy prog (or the occasionally jazzy, country or pop/rock) mode, but in a shoegaze alternative ... (read more)

Report this review (#1375188) | Posted by Progrussia | Saturday, February 28, 2015 | Review Permanlink

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