Motorpsycho
The Tower

My backward journey continues into the world of Motorpsycho, of whom until a few days ago I had heard nothing, absolutely NOTHING!

I started with "The Crucible" (2019), a great synopsis of the Prog season of 1973-74 (King Crimson, ELP, and Yes above all) and now I'm about to talk about "The Tower."

Motorpsycho is a steamship boarding mercenary tomb raiders, traveling the world à la Indiana Jones.

On this journey, they seize artifacts from various glorious musical dynasties that reached their peak in the post-Bacherozzian period and were then overwhelmed by the great invasions of Punkian Maximo.

In their hold, there's room for relics from the Late English Psychedelic era as in the piece "Intrepid Explorer."

There's the West Coast trunk of the CSN rite with the piece "Maypole" and with "Stardust," which is even a sort of clone of Helplessly Hoping.

The endless "A Pacific Sonata" seems to come from the native tribe of the Grateful Dead.

In the OOPArts section, you can find the waxed canvas of Elp and company with "The Tower," while metallic relics in Hard Prog Crimsonian style (with evident Sabbathian reflections) sinisterly shine with "Bartok The Universe," "In Every Dream Home..." and "The Cuckoo."

There's even room for the Steppenwolf rides in "A.S.F.E." where at the onset they dare to resurrect the riff of "Paranoid."

The last tomb plundered is the "Yesclassic" one with "Ship of Fools," where it's clearly shown that the origin of the "Yes Culture" is interstellar space.

Certainly, these are purely personal opinions, dictated by my partial knowledge and musical experience. They don't mean a damn thing.

...Motorpsycho, on the other hand, seem to navigate comfortably in any situation, like musical MacGyvers. There's nothing from the past that cannot be extracted, reassembled, and used for the purpose of creating coherent and effective pieces, even when inspiration overflows and spills over in every direction.

In the end, they remind me of this unsettling phrase: "We are the Motorpsycho. Your musical and cultural characteristics will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."