(((O))) Review: Motorpsycho – The Gaia II Space Corps

As the world continues to turn, so Motorpsycho continue to churn out albums and as vital as the earth’s movements are to life, then so it is that the aforementioned band’s music continues to revitalise, intrigue, and energise our souls. Whether its long form prog epics, tight heavy metal, or loose garage rock, you are guaranteed a good time.

It’s the former that they deliver this time on The Gaia II Space Corps, and after a series of albums which progressively got more… well, progressive, here they reign those tendencies in and deliver an album of short nuggets of pure garage rock. In their terms, heavy music before heavy music existed and there’s a case to be made for these to actually be long lost tracks of the pre-Nuggets era.

‘Fanny Again, Or’ may ape Love with their track title but its gloriously rampant guitar noise sounds nothing like them. Instead it’s an overtly chaotic opening which sets its stall out for the rest of the album. Shades of psychedelia peek out before evolving ever more blatantly on the following ‘The Great Stash Robbery’ which uses wonderful vocal harmonies to keep the song moving.

There’s a lot of guitars on this album. No sooner as the previous track ended in a squall of guitars than they start up again on the locomotive breath of ‘TSMcR’. Urgent drums form a skiffle like beat behind the chugging guitars whilst once again the vocals flower into psychedelic pastures. Never have Motorpsycho sounded so concise as this, yet still so progressive. It’s as if they took one look at their standard thirty minute epic and said OK, so how do we do this as a three minute track, and then actually manage to do it. 

‘The Hornet’ slows things down slightly to a blues shuffle before the title track ramps it up in an almost glorious evocation of the golden age of radio/TV jingles. Indeed, you can smell the comic book paper and the day glo colours of cereal boxes from the 1950’s. If the Jetsons ever required a soundtrack, Motorpsycho are the band for the occasion. ‘The Oracle’ is the closest they come to all out prog on a track which evokes the early pastoral sound of Genesis. ‘Black As Night’ finishes the album in a triumphal way as Motorpsycho disappear into wherever they go to continue to create such smorgasbord as this. 

For those expecting the full on prog epics then you may come away disappointed but by now the majority of Motorpsycho fans will have accepted that you never know quite what to expect and although its’ only a brief 35 minutes or so, the album is such that it takes you away from reality for that time and situates you in some glorious world of day glo psych and rattling garage rock. It’s almost perfect in every way.