Posts tagged Motion Turns it On

Now here’s something we don’t enjoy everyday – a live album.  When we were growing up, no doubt influenced by what appeared to be the relative ease with which Primus and the Beach Boys were able to capture the essence of themselves on Suck on This and Beach Boys Party!, respectively, it seemed like a live recording was the way to go.  Why even bother with studio trickery!  Just show up, plug in, rock out and dub it onto tape!  Frankly our views were more hardened by de Schmog’s Fairy Tale, which we, to this day, will swear an oath to blog is a better sounding version of the band than any of their studio recordings.  Oh youth.

Fairy Tale, we later learned (aka, when reading the liner notes), had some post-show work done in the studio.  And it turns out Beach Boys Party! wasn’t live at all, recorded entirely at a studio, a gimmick cooked up by Brian Wilson himself.  Oh yeah, and we liked Primus.  Now older, and listening to Rattle and Hum with significantly less frequency, we’ve come to view the live recording as a junior partner to the subtler and more satisfying craft of multi-track recording.  Granted there are exceptions, like Spiritualized’s epic Royal Albert Hall and Nirvana’s catalog deconstructing Unplugged in New York, but for the most part they just come off as half baked; something thrown out there by a record label to maintain brand awareness while their hit machine struggles to compose its next opus.  Rarely if ever, afterall, can the entire sensory experience of a concert be re-created by a feast only for the ears. 

Doubly so for “local” live albums (again, Fairy Tale being an obvious exception).  Frequently, they’re a bad microphone in the audience or recorded directly from the sound-board, neither one being particularly good source mater from which to construct a decent final mix.  MySpace is littered with live recordings of local bands that sound so awful it boggles the mind people would put them up there for others to hear.  Sure, its great to be stoked about your music and what to put it out there for people to hear, but good biscuits and gravy from AAA Cafe, have a little respect for the shape your art is in.  So, with all that on record, you might be just as suprised as we were at how Burt Reynolds as Malone Motion Turns it On’s new Live at the Southpaw EP is (note:  Burt Reynolds as Malone kicks ass). 

Setting aside the production pitfalls of live recordings for a minute, it actually makes more sense for MTIO to make a live album than almost any other band in town.  During the year of the INSTRUMENTAL MADNESS of our lord that was 2007, you could generally wheat and chaff the various vocal-eschewing acts around town with a few simple descriptors.  Blades are the guys with the mathy time signatures and angular riffs; By the End of Tonight are the guys who can’t write a song with fewer than one thousand parts; Co-Pilot found the part of outer space that has lots of clouds; Rustler builds slow and steady to shredertaining metal heights; Golden Axe WILL MELT YOUR FACE; MTIO are looser and more improvisational.  That right there is why Live at the Southpaw works so well.

Their debut outing, Rima, though a fine piece of work, froze their songs into a static, repeatable artifact.  So while we enjoyed it, we felt it wasn’t as ‘genuine’ as the band was live, when it felt like anything could happen and their songs a stack of Mad Libs waiting for whatever outside influences might make one outing so distinct from another.  Here, like a rock solid jazz quartet doing its thing in black and white photography cool, the songs are freer, and the improvisations more organic than the could be in a studio where second takes are allowed.  “Satelightening”, a track on both, clocks in a full three minutes longer here than on Rima.  And granted, while anytime you put something to tape you run the risk of making it definitive, the effect here is making us want to head out the door to their next show and see what noun, verb and adjective they throw in this time.

Motion Turns it On’s Live at the Southpaw is available at record stores around town and, starting yesterday, via digital download from iTunes and their MySpace (careful Mac users, you cannot download SNOCAP songs, but you won’t figure that out until after you pay for them).  Party.