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Motorhome brings the pub to your house on their debut recorde
SCENE MAGAZINE Fort Collins, CO. by Nathan Harper
Motorhome's first album, like most first albums, is a stylistic grab bag of sorts. While the group's live exuberance does come through the record, it remains evident that the band is still finding their voice as songwriters.
The self-titled record features a variety of sounds, ranging from New Orleans' blues piano to punk and bluegrass, all mixed with their down home variety of country-rock. Honestly, it felt a little weird hearing their music without a beer in hand, because as anyone who's ever seen them knows, Motorhome's rock is perfectly suited to bars, roadhouses, saloons or any other place where people gather to enjoy their favorite imbibe.
Roots-rock, alt-country, Americana- call it what you want, there's a hundred pubs across the country with four or five hard-working, beard-sporting rock'n'rollers playing midweek headlining gigs and opening up for national touring jam-grass bands when they come through town. Motorhome is such a band, and while their chosen brand of rock certainly doesn't put them in sparse company, what really is whether or not their hearts are in it, and it is here that Motorhome succeeds.
The music, while varied, never sounds like a pastiche, and whether the vocals are coming through with Lucero-like grit or Axl-like melodrama, the songs all manage to feel heartfelt. As tone shifts between humor, heartbreak, and life on the road, the band draws on their many influences to deliver a catchy electric/acoustic blends, adding plenty of Hammond to the album opener "You Can't See Me," while infusing energy into "New Kind of Band" and other straight rockers, often delivering on the group's love of more straightforward acts like the Supersuckers.
On softer numbers, such as "Razor" and "Maria," the acoustic guitars come out and the pace slows a bit, but the album maintains a surprisingly ful sound for a home-produced record. Recorded in the basement of mandolin/bouzouki/accordian-player Darren Radach's house, the album keeps its production missteps to a minimum, only occasionally burying an organ when it should soar, of giving an acoustic instrument too much precedence in the mix.
Whether they meant it or not, the record's highlight is the final song, "Johnson's Corner," a country-fried exhortation on the benefits of I-25's oasis for America's most underrated laborers, truckers. The songis funny and succeeds with a sing-a-long factor of one-million, even taking a quick Judas Priest-esque side trip to relate a PG-13 story of carnal excess at said truck-stop. Great song.
And so the record succeeds in that, for fans of the genre, there's enough here to make listeners want to see motorhome play live, which is the biggest thing fans can do to ensure that the band is able to deliver a second record.
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