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Upcoming Shows
Birds on a Wire
FRIDAY & SATURDAY, March 26 & 27
PULLMAN
$35 Adv./$45 Door
$25 Group Rate of 10
Shearwater
w/the Hospital Ships & Wye Oak
FRIDAY, Apr. 30 8PM
@ The BellTower
PULLMAN
$12 Adv./$15 Door
Roadside Graves
w/TBD
THURSDAY, Aug. 5
@ TBA -
Stereopathic on Hypem
Mar
26
The artistic travels of Motorbikes, according to Nicholas Wilbur, was possibly inspired by pizza. Wilbur, close friend and associate of Paul Adam Benson, the artist behind the music of Motorbikes, shared the history with me. Benson and Wilbur were best buds growing up in Mountain Home, Arkansas, a ramshackle little town in the Ozarks. After high school and rolling through a few ups and downs, their plan originally was to move to Springfield, MO, get a house, and build a brick oven.Wilbur explained that, “when it was snowing outside, we could go outside and make pizzas in our brick oven. Then we rented a house, and it wasn’t allowed to have a brick oven.
Plan Two seems to be working out just dandy. Benson, now migrated to Anacortes, WA, with Wilbur, has just produced the album New Color with his one-man-band Motorbikes. The volume is a syncopated weave of looped drum and strum with such a natural thread of vocals that a surprising vigor is syncopated into the understated sarcasm. Like Benson, the album is quiet, self-controlled, and radiates a kind of shocking energy through the restraint and the power of the reggae beat.
New Color is an album that depicts a person being washed over with a new dye by following the process of self-discovery. The title track, “New Color,” says that “you tried to invent a new color but you’ve got to work with what you see.” Beginning with this acknowledgement that you have to work with the present and not an impossibly-whitewashed past, Benson’s lyrics follow the progression of self-arguments, step-by-logical-step, until this self has analyzed those twisted complicated feelings and can confirm his opinions on love and family and self. The album leaves you there at the point where he can make a decision. The volume makes for an intriguing experiment in self-exploration framed by the rubbling rhythms of Benson’s acoustic reggae.
“The music maintains the sound of a very good mood,” stated Fontee Fount Recordings. The Fontee Fount cited hip-hop, “dated African music such as Charles A. Chepkwony,” Douda Dembele, others like Karl Blau, and “his really big box of African Tapes,” as influences.“There are a lot of drums,” the Fontee Fount explained.
The essential artistry of the album reaches past the music to the visual gratification of the cover.Like Motorbikes’ previous release, Bleu, the album is a tide of color. Benson, a natural talent, created a hand-stitched tie-dyed masterpiece of a case to contain his new release. In the song, “Things I Sing,” Benson swears that he’ll “listen to color-schemes” alone, and both the music and the cover art of New Color conspire to inspire you to do just the same. Motorbikes’ mastery of rhythm and simultaneous mastery of tie-dye intimate a deep-rooted comfort with spontaneity. Perhaps that explains why Wilbur cites salsa as one of Benson’s possible influences and why the house badger at the Department of Safety, the musical foundation in Anacortes where Benson and Wilbur have residencies, wears a crown on some days.
The House Badger, prettied up for the Fontee Fest
Molly is a freelance journalist and a senior at New St. Andrew’s College with a special interest in postcards and goldfish.She writes for The Loop 21 and keeps the blog A New Amsterdam
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