[Click play above to stream ‘A.S.F.E.’ from Motorpsycho’s The Tower. Album is out Sept. 8 via Stickman Records and Rune Grammofon.]

Maybe remaining Motorpsycho founders Bent Sæther and Hans Magnus “Snah” Ryan feel they have something to prove with their latest long-player, The Tower. For what it’s worth, they’re probably mistaken about that. The Trondheim natives are already in Norway’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and since first getting together in 1989, they’ve become a crucial influence in progressive, heavy and psychedelic rock across Scandinavia and greater Europe. They’ve scored plays, collaborated with orchestras, written commissioned works and been heralded by audiences and critics alike. Though they’re viciously under-known in the US, they’ve released upwards of 20 LPs, plus other singles and short releases, at a blazingly prolific rate, and constantly offered their listeners sonic development while retaining an identity that is unmistakably their own. Books have been written about them. Films made. To put it another way, they’re a big frickin’ deal, and they have been for quite some time.

In 2016, Sæther (who handles lead vocals, bass, guitar, keys and drums and also played in Spidergawd for their first three records) and Ryan (guitar, vocals, keys, bass and various other strings) said goodbye to longtime drummer Kenneth Kapstad (also and still of Spidergawd) following the particularly proggy Here be Monsters full-length, and with The Tower (released by Rune Grammofon in Norway and Stickman Records for the rest of Europe), they’ve redirected their efforts toward sounding fully reenergized. No doubt the acquisition of drummer Tomas Järmyr has something to do with that — the infusion of fresh blood seems to have brought a restorative effect even to the pacing of serene, drumless moments like the harmonies of the Mellotron-laced “Stardust” — but however it got there, The Tower comes across as a burst of creativity from Motorpsycho, continuing the progressive, forward march of Here be Monsters while also landing with a considerably heavier tonal impact on songs like the opening salvo of the title-track and “Bartok of the Universe,” as well as “In Every Dream Home (There’s a Dream of Something Else),” and the closing pair of “The Cuckoo” and “Ship of Fools.”

Now, it can be a fine line, because The Tower still shares plenty of the post-Greg Lake-era King Crimsoned progadelic pastoralism of its predecessor, but to put it in terms of that band, it’s like the difference between “The Court of the Crimson King” and “21st Century Schizoid Man,” where Here be Monsters is the former and The Tower is the latter. Still in the same vein, but by seamlessly integrating Järmyr into the trio, Motorpsycho can remain as intricate in their composition and arrangements as they were with Kapstad behind the kit, while offering more thrust behind The Tower in cuts like “A.S.F.E.” (an acronym for “a song for everyone”), which seems to imagine what would happen if “Weird Al” Yankovic decided to go space rock — hint: it would be awesome — and the subsequent “Intrepid Explorer,” which builds in a patient swell of melody to one of the album’s most satisfying payoffs before receding into the folkish “Stardust.” Of course, Motorpsycho are still very much Motorpsycho, but as they have all along, during Kapstad‘s 10-plus years with the band and before that as well, they’re making efforts to reshape that definition for themselves and their followers.

Does it work? Yes, it does. The Tower is a significant climb, and well past the standards of manageability with its 10-track and nearly 85-minute runtime. But the final three tracks, the dreamy-into-percussive “A Pacific Sonata” and the aforementioned “The Cuckoo” and “Ship of Fools” consume more than 37 minutes of that on their own, and a clear 2LP structure to the placement of the songs — with “The Tower,” “Bartok of the Universe” and “A.S.F.E.” as side A, “Intrepid Explorer,” “Stardust” and “In Every Dream Home (There’s a Dream of Something Else)” as side B, the mood-setting psych-folk of “The Maypole” moving into “A Pacific Sonata” for side C and “The Cuckoo” and “Ship of Fools” as a final immersion on side D — makes it that much easier for the listener to put their trust in Sæther, Ryan and Järmyr for the duration. A clear shift in purpose between the first and second platters, from the harder prog of the earlier cuts to the peaceful vibes of “The Maypole” and “Pacific Sonata” — prefaced somewhat by “Stardust” — and the okay-now-it’s-time-to-get-swallowed-in-this closing statement of “The Cuckoo” and “Ship of Fools” (despite the memorable hook of the latter), only reinforces the message to those who’d engage with the material:

Relax. You’re in the hands of professionals.

Maybe it is that overarching sense of command that lets Motorpsycho not only introduce Järmyr without missing a beat (pun totally intended; why even ask?), but do so with a consuming double-LP nearly twice as long as its predecessor and arriving just a year later. If that’s the case, then Ryan and Sæther‘s many years working together are a context from which The Tower can’t and shouldn’t be divorced, but if they’re motivated by a need to reinforce their own will to keep going despite the lineup change or if they’ve simply hit a creative burst, the results are a triumph in these songs. Whether it’s in the longer-form explorations of “A Pacific Sonata” and “Ship of Fools” — the keys alone of which make it a highlight, let alone all the torrential churn surrounding at its apex — the quirky craftsmanship of “Bartok of the Universe” and “A.S.F.E.,” the brief acoustic excursions of “Stardust” and “The Maypole” or the arc-defining prog of the title-track, “Intrepid Explorer,” “In Every Dream Home (There’s a Dream of Something Else)” and “The Cuckoo,” there isn’t a moment that doesn’t earn its place, and as few 2LPs can, The Tower brings forth coherent realization without giving up on the varied nature of its delivery.

That is to say, Motorpsycho chart a difficult course for themselves and then navigate it with enviable ease. Longtime listeners would expect no less of them, but The Tower remains a marked achievement in a discography crowded with them, and if it’s signaling the start of a new era for the band, one can only look forward to the growth Motorpsycho will continue to foster as they inch closer to 30 years on from their beginning. They sound, and are, vital.

Motorpsycho on Thee Facebooks

Motorpsycho on Twitter

Motorpsycho on Instagram

Motorpsycho website

Stickman Records website

Stickman Records on Thee Facebooks

Stickman Records on Twitter

Rune Grammofon on Thee Facebooks

Rune Grammofon on Instagram

Rune Grammofon website

The Latin title of Swedish classic heavy rockers The Tower‘s full-length debut, Hic Abundant Leones, translates to “here are many lions.” A warning. Likewise, one might take a listen to the three-minute track “Exile” from The Tower‘s first outing for Bad Omen (North American distro via Prosthetic) and take it as a sign of what the record itself has in store. Just as a lion isn’t the only thing that can kill you in the jungle, so too does Hic Abundant Leones have a deceptively multi-pronged attack, and while “Exile” gives a solid demonstration of the Uppsala four-piece’s retro vibes and penchant for lyrical references — you’ll note appearances from The Doormouse and Queen of Hearts, à la both Jefferson Airplane and Alice in Wonderland — it’s by no means a complete overview of the album’s nine-track/48-minute span.

Immediate comparisons to Graveyard will be made for “Exile,” thanks in part to the bluesy vocal cadences of frontman Erik, but The Tower are more push than boogie, ultimately, and as cuts like “Lucy,” “Moonstoned” and the closing eponymous cut “The Tower” range past six minutes each — the latter clocking in at 11:41 to serve as the longest on Hic Abundant Leones and a companion piece to the Beatles-references in “Lucy” — the band seem to be pushing against such convenient assignations. Still, with their warmth of tone and natural, live-sounding spaciousness, the guitars of August, bass of Viktor and drums of Tommie, not to mention the nods in the lyrics to Baby Boomer greats, Hic Abundant Leones puts forth a heavy ’70s loyalism that comes through on just about every level of their presentation.

They not only acknowledge this in the songs themselves, but even unto their bio, which follows a timeline beginning in 1938 and carrying the band through the ’70s and into 2012, when they reportedly emerged following rumors of the end of the world with — what else? — the demo that led to this album. Good times.

Hic Abundant Leones is due out April 15 on Bad Omen Records. Preorders are available now. More info from the aforementioned bio follows the premiere of “Exile” below.

Please enjoy:

The Tower, “Exile”

“It was back in 1938 that the brothers Erik and August and their friend Viktor migrated south. They left the small village in the northern forests where they grew up for the big city and the university, to study the science of harvesting the earth. On the fields beside the burial mounds in old Uppsala they met Tommie, a Soviet refugee. He showed them his sole possession, a blues vinyl from 5300 BC, suspecting that it would fit their melancholy northern souls. The four sat down in a barn and played a blues jam which lasted until 1945, when the war ended and the post-apocalyptic nuclear winter began…”

So begins the extraordinary tale of Swedish ‘bad luck boogie’ combo THETOWER, whose cryptic, swinging timewarp of a debut LP is now released via London’s Bad Omen Records. The offbeat freakbeat and phantasmagorical psych-blues of Hic Abundant Leones exude an ageless charm and resounding singularity, striking eerie, dreamlike atmospheres that seemingly confirm THE TOWER’s eccentric parallel-universe narrative.

Sorting facts from the fantasy of the band’s complex mythology proves onerous; the quartet bonded during “long, all-night rehearsals in an old vicarage outside of Uppsala” and “began as some kind of personal quest for us but once we realised that we had a gospel we started preaching it. It is not something new. It is as ancient as the Sumerian blues records played by the Dionysos cults of the Postapocalyptic Era. Moreover, there have always been prophets of this gospel: wrayed Indians, electric shamans, crazy horses, black skinheads, exhumed singers, diddlying sheriffs, mean lick hookers, third eye girls, many a stooge, all-man brothers, Birmingham attendants of the Sabbath, and many, many more.”

Allegedly splitting in the 70s, they returned to the Tower in 1983, where they remained until 2012 – “when rumours of the end of the world enticed them to leave”. They recorded a demo (soon pressed to 12″ by Dybbuk Records) before cutting this mystical long-player. “The days in the studio were smooth. The loveable Joona Hassinen, who we recorded with, made us feel very comfortable, as if we were rehearsing in our ‘tower room’.”

And what is the significance of that peculiar title? “We saw it written on an ancient map of the (then known) world. It literally means ‘here are lions in abundance’ and was used by the cartographer to designate a uncivilised, wild and dangerous territory. When applied to Northern Scandinavia it becomes very weird, because there are no lions here, but this only furthers the poetry by making the lions mythical. The record is such a territory. So is the place where we rehearse. And stages we play on, and the vistas of our minds, the future and the past; the unknowns we want to explore and yet, paradoxically, also the regions where we feel the most at home.”

The Tower on Thee Facebooks

Bad Omen Records

Prosthetic Records

Rife with a gleefully weird sense of progressive mania, the title-track of Norwegian five-piece Vulture Industries‘ new album, The Tower, works quickly to turn genres on their head. Their third full-length overall, The Tower marks the Season of Mist debut for the band, whose affinity for the aurally strange should find resonance with fans of anyone from The Ocean to Enslaved to Diablo Swing Orchestra.

The immediate double-kick push that starts “The Tower” probably most resembles the middle of those three comparison points — Vulture Industries guitarist Øyvind Madsen did a stint on keys in Enslaved prior to their acquiring Herband Larsen, who also mixed The Tower — but thanks in no small part to the performance of vocalist Bjørnar Erevik Nilsen, there’s no trouble distinguishing between the two. While raging out lyrically against the evils inherent in the unceasing push toward commercialism, Nilsen literally lists rules of being a part of “The Tower”‘s dominion, e.g. “Rule #1: Each man is what he owns/Whether or not one truly exist is a question of having things.”

He never goes quite so far as to call for an uprising against our capitalist masters — it would be pointless anyway; the bad guys won a long time ago — but the spirit of the track remains rousing for the duration anyway, the fivesome of Nilsen, Madsen, guitarist Elvind Huse, bassist Kyrre Teigen and drummer Tor Helge Gjengedal offsetting some of the blackened thrust with neo-prog metal noodling before the insistence resumes with the memorable, intricate chorus. Resolution, such as it is, comes on dramatic and vicious in kind, “The Tower” culminating not with the destruction of the title structure itself, but with one’s losing their very humanity in succumbing to it. Somebody’s read Marx. Right on.

Today I have the pleasure of hosting the premiere of the art deco-themed lyric video for “The Tower.” As you can see in the PR wire info that follows, Vulture Industries will release The Tower on Oct. 1 in North America, Sept. 27 everywhere else, on Season of Mist, the album is available now for pre-order and the clip was designed by Fabien Laubry based around the cover art by Costin Chioreanu. I think you’ll agree the look meshes well with the song’s anarchist underpinnings:

Vulture Industries, “The Tower” lyric video

VULTURE INDUSTRIES’ debut, ‘The Tower’ is slated for release on October 1st in North America (September 27th rest of world). ‘The Tower’ was recorded at the Conclave & Earshot Studios in Bergen. The album was mixed by Herbrand Larsen (ENSLAVED) and mastered by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios (OPETH, KATATONIA, DEVIN TOWNSEND, IHSAHN, ENSLAVED).

Through their charismatic musicianship, VULTURE INDUSTRIES quickly earned the reputation of a formidable live act, characterized by the fusion of technical prowess with eccentric, manic performances by frontman Bjørnar Erevik Nilsen. “The Tower” explores dark musical vistas and lyrics within a unique mixture of progressive, experimental, extreme and even foreboding symphonic elements. With a wealth of creativity and the ability to shift gears smoothly in the blink of an eye, VULTURE INDUSTRIES bend, twist, and shape their songs into living entities embodying the width and breadth of human emotion. Comparisons to unique and trail-blazing artists such as FAITH NO MORE, DEVIN TOWNSEND, ENSLAVED and NICK CAVE, only act as starting points to this unique heavy rock band.

‘The Tower’ is available for pre order here.

Vulture Industries website

Vulture Industries on Thee Facebooks

Season of Mist