The Lure Of Oblivion
The hard-working Norwegian trio are back with more genre-bending fun.
As they enter their third decade as torchbearers for Norway’s progressive rock scene, Motorpsycho seem to have tapped into a deep wellspring of creativity. Since new drummer Tomas Järmyr joined in 2017, they’ve released three remarkable albums – The Tower, The Crucible, and The All Is One – that have spanned everything from trippy space rock to folk and synthwave. Now, with Kingdom Of Oblivion, the Trondheim trio of Bent Saether, Hans Magnus ‘Snah’ Ryan, and Järmyr are leaning into their formative influences by getting their riffs on. “The guitar player Snah and I are both in our early 50s and we grew up on the new wave of heavy metal and all that stuff, so we’re basically metal kids at heart, that’s where we come from,” says bassist and vocalist Saether. “We cannot really say no to a good riff when it presents itself.”
“A lot of the lyrical stuff is about that imaginary Victoriana that Alan Moore has written about in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
that kind of vibe.”
As the unstoppable Motorpsycho trip out with Kingdom Of Oblivion, Bent Saether talks to Prog about the vital importance of being free to follow wherever the muse leads them, even if it’s on a merry dance with Greta Thunberg, Victorian weirdos and a cosmic octopus.
The seeds that eventually bloomed into
Kingdom Of Oblivion were sown two years ago when the band were working on The All Is One. The centrepiece of that album is the five-part
N.O.X. suite and they found they had written material that didn’t quite gel with the rest of that particular musical journey. “When we got that N.O.X. thing together, we figured that a lot of this other stuff doesn’t fit with it; it’d just be too big, too bulky, too heavy and too much,” says Saether, “so we decided to do something else with the heavy metal songs or the hard rockers and put them aside. We had a bit more of a psych rock focus on that record, so this is the metal batch. That was where we started: ‘Okay, let’s make a pure metal record, that’d be fun, we haven’t done that in quite a few years.’ As these things usually do, we started adding some acoustic guitars here and there and, all of a sudden, it was more balanced. It’s a record with a lot of light as well as all that shade and heaviosity. It turned into a bigger album than we originally envisioned but it works the best this way, we figured. The softer stuff makes the heavy stuff heavier, and vice versa, so it feels like a balanced and worthy record.”
While Kingdom Of Oblivion may be generously proportioned with riffs, opening with the sludgy proto-metal of The Waning
(Pt. 1&2), as always the writing process began rather more sedately, with Saether or Snah strumming on an acoustic guitar. “When the kids have gone to bed, we sit down on the couch, put the telly on and we just noodle around on the guitar until something comes up and then you record that into your telephone,” says Saether. “That usually works for all kinds of songs, if it’s tender and acoustic or big and riffy, if it sounds good on an acoustic on your couch, you’re good. Then you get some sense of the scale of it, if it’s supposed to be a biggie or if it’s good as a little small thing. Then you just chisel away and work on it until it makes sense and you’re as close as you get to feeling that you’ve realised whatever the idea was.”
The lyrics on the new record span a diverse a range of subjects to match the many moods and colours of the music, although as with the preceding three albums, Saether found himself responding to the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States. “I cracked open a door when Trump got elected and I got a bit political, something that I hadn’t done in 25 years,” he says. “It felt pertinent to talk about the world and real things, ‘Where are we going and why are we doing it like this?’ instead of the purely poetical. So, I spent three records working on that stuff. Since some of this new record was written at the same time, it has a bit of that too. The title track is primarily concerned with the opiate epidemic, but there’s one song about ecology. I guess Greta Thunberg made her mark on us as well.”
As the acoustic, folky tunes found their place among the heavier moments, that led Saether to delve into the darker, arcane corners of
British history, touching upon 19th century occultism via poets, artists, and writers. “A lot of the lyrical stuff is about that imaginary Victoriana that Alan Moore has written about in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that kind of vibe,” he says. “People like Austin Osman Spare and Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Harry Clarke, those kinds of Victorian weirdos. Some of the songs have a bit of that mythic touch to them instead of the purely political. The second-to-last track,
“We cannot really say no to a good riff when it presents itself.”
The Transmutation Of Cosmoctopus Lurker, that’s a pure Lovecraftian reference. Horror and Victoriana and a bit of ecology, a lot of different stuff. It was liberating to not feel like you had to sing about politics, so it took its own path.”
An early contender for best song title of the year, The Transmutation Of Cosmoctopus Lurker was summoned into the world with the assistance of a little post-gig libation.
“It started, obviously as these things do, on the tour bus after a couple of pints,” says Saether. “The word cosmoctopus came up, what is a cosmoctopus? Well, it must surely be a huge, cosmic octopus, right? We giggled about that, forget about it, then all of a sudden this whole Lovecraft reference revealed itself. Okay, if the cosmoctopus is a Lovecraftian thing, what can we do with that? Then you add a little bit of Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, and the song got so epic and big that it felt like it could have a name like a novel. Cosmic octopi, it’s stupid and great at the same time. If it makes you giggle, you’re safe. That’s one of our things – if it makes us giggle, we’re onto something.”
Saether traces his interest in venerable English eccentrics back to a teenage infatuation with Led Zeppelin and Aleister Crowley, and the album cover by Sverre Malling features the likeness of Algernon Swinburne, a 19th century poet and novelist with a taste for the taboo. Saether calls him, “one of those Victorian weirdos as well, a poet who claimed to be a cannibal I think, he claimed to have eaten somebody. Very strange. It’s a great little picture – it has a certain resemblance to some Beardsley or Harry Clarke drawings… it has that Victorian, old English vibe.”
With the band unable to tour, they’ve been pouring their energies into working their way through a backlog of songs that have been waiting to be hammered into shape. “We did a little rough count of the demos a year ago and we had 70 songs, I think,” says Saether. Some are 20 minutes long, others around two minutes, but there’s a wealth of unreleased material, a situation that Saether blames on their 2019 album. “I think The Crucible fucked us up a bit,” he says, “because that was only three songs, not the usual 10 that you’re used to getting rid of. We got a bit constipated, so now there’s enough music for another four [albums], I guess. The key is to not ever stop writing, never say no to the muse when she comes knocking and just document whatever it is that comes. Then when you have the time and possibility to work it out, you can put it out of your head and down onto a hard drive and free up more space for even more songs.”
What all this means is that, even as Kingdom Of Oblivion is still fresh from the oven, Motorpsycho are already busy recording in their rehearsal space. “Now it’s 18 songs and the longest one is seven-something minutes so it’s kind of normal, almost,” says Saether. “I still haven’t wrapped my head around quite what it is yet and we don’t know what we’re going to do with it. It’s enough material for two albums. We’ll see. We haven’t started mixing them yet and we don’t really know quite what to do with them but at least we’ve kept busy. It’s a good way to stay focused and it gives us a purpose when you can’t do anything else.”
The direction of the new material sounds like a shift away from the riffage on Kingdom Of Oblivion, with Saether describing the mood as, “extremely folky, very quiet, very sparse. Most of it is acoustic, there are a few electric guitars in there but not a lot, not a lot of out-and-out rockers, no riffage. All these little things fell out of us and we needed to document them.”
The ever-shifting sound of Motorpsycho is not something that the trio explicitly discuss among themselves. Instead, it’s just a natural part of their creative journey and the expression of a hunger for fresh musical experiences. “Usually, we go through phases where we focus on stuff and when we feel like we’ve achieved whatever it was that made us go in that direction, we naturally go elsewhere,” says Saether. “We don’t really want to repeat ourselves and we never really had any big hits, so we’ve not had any pressure to repeat ourselves either, which is a big thing. That’s usually what happens, if you have any kind of success, the label wants you to do the same thing again. If you don’t really have any big success, you don’t have that pressure, you’re more free to do your thing. When you release an album a year at least, like we do, it’s more or less documenting the process. It’s just pottering along and then whatever we release now is what we were into last year.”
They’re blessed to have a supportive label in Rune Grammofon, where the founder Rune Kristoffersen seems untroubled by thoughts of commercial appeal. Saether believes the label is a great match for Motorpsycho as they’re kindred spirits with Kristoffersen. “We’re all in this because we want to make good shit,” he says, “that’s why he’s running the label, because what he loves most of all is getting a great record from somebody that cared and loved what’s on there, putting it on his shelf and then enjoying it. It’s kind of the same with us, we don’t really have any ambitions other than trying to make as great music as we can at any opportunity. If something good, i.e. money or whatever, comes out of that, it’s a bonus, but it’s all about the music and if that’s no good then we’re no good and we should stop. But as long as the music’s there, we’ll put it out and hopefully somebody will like it, love it and appreciate it.”
Kingdom Of Oblivion is out now on Rune Grammofon. See www.motorpsycho.no for more information.