Houston-based Motion Turns it On showed us in 2008 with Live at the Southpaw just how creative and technically proficient its modus operandi is, and as if that wasn’t enough, now, with Kaleidoscopic Equinox, the band has taken several steps forward in the development of its sound, bringing to it a new edge of urgency and violence barely hinted at previously.
Gone is the incredibly crispy production of Live, muddling the sound and making it heavy. Instead of strolling through jazzy and calm landscapes, we’re now blazing through them in a bullet train powered by psychedelic electricity. The sun is right over the equator, and as we look at it our eyes transform into a dozen mirrors that decompose its light into perfectly symmetrical shapes that radiate noise and colors. Colors of every hue, for a new instrument has joined the fray of Mars Volta-styled frenzy: two muffled voices sing and shout along the music as valuable additions to the band’s repertoire, enriching the already strong compositions with dashes of mystery and unexpected polychrome combinations. In this fantastic vision of rainbow patterns we’re drawn into finding tones we’re familiar with; several pieces from the EPs, like “Moayedi” and “Lo Pido Con Piedad,” make a return with longer forms and even deeper attention to detail, while parts of others, like Live’s “Timber!!!”, one of TSB’s top tracks of 2008, make it into new songs, pleasantly recognizable and yet completely different and improved upon.
As everything speeds by, painting a blurred and shifting stained glass of keyboard solos and guitar wails, our train changes velocities in loud thumping rhythms of prog-tastic elegance and precision, leading our ears into tense freak-outs as easily as it crosses noise-powered electronic bridges into sweet melodies and meditative space-rock freedom. There is nary a single moment of rest; the train accelerates thunderously into math-rock explosions of virtuosity as the earth around us cracks and sinks into million-color nightmares and fantasies tainted by digital processes and its recognizably particular noises (like those high frequencies emitted by old televisions when turned on). There are, of course, quieter moments in the trip, those instances where the colors start easily defined but gradually decompose into a different tonality; the kaleidoscope shifts and a new pattern emerges, leaving us with the very same sense of urgency and break-neck speed of the whole as it keeps changing and leaving us behind. In this sense, the slower moments are but lapses of ‘quiet intensity’, like a madman’s visions projected inwards.
While The Mars Volta are the most directly comparable group that comes to mind, Motion Turns it On manages to move outside the realm of seventies-worship, sounding more contemporary and aware of what makes current prog derivations such as math-rock tick. After all, who needs saxophones if we can experiment with a guitar’s distortion in ways that make it sound like a brass army of pure lightning? Possessed by the multicolored demons of sound-over-time, these musicians are setting the bar for instrumental acts higher than ever, driving our train for fifty minutes of complex arrangements and aural bursts of psychedelia with a prowess and imagination uncommonly encountered in the prog family of genres of our times.
“And just where is this train headed to?” one might ask. Well, it’s headed rapidly into pure bliss, and even if at the end we are exhausted by all the excitement and agitation, we should realize that is a part of what makes this record great; even if it seemingly starts as a ‘bad trip’, everything ends with spacey, electronic, if still inertially fast and furious, tranquility.
-David Murrieta