After 3 relatively quiet years, the magnificent Motorpsycho strikes again. For the first time since 1998's 'Trust Us', they've gone all the way and are - in cahoots with the Mighty Stickman Label (MSL) - again releasing a huge, sprawling, epic and dark meisterwerk: "Black Hole / Blank Canvas". Recorded and mixed over a 6-week period in Eindhoven's "The Void" studios, this is the first album without their long-time drummer Håkon Gebhardt. Losing Geb after so many years together was a big kick up the old wazoo and helped make this album the fresh and vital Bundle of Joy it became. Having forgone the strings and horns so prevalent on albums like "Let Them Eat Cake","Phanerothyme" and "It's A Love Cult", the instinctive side of Motorpsycho is what's on display here; the arrangements are kept comparatively sparse, and the boys play everything, including drums, themselves. Snah and Bent clearly felt it was time to do or die and opted - in good motorpsychodelic tradition - for 'kicking out the jams' as the lingo has it. The result is an album that rocks like little else in the MP canon, and for what it's worth, shows what Motorpsycho sound like before they start thinking about what they sound like. The production work (by Motorpsycho's longtime sound engineer Pieter Kloos along with the band) also has a 'rockier' sensibility than other post-millennial Motorpsycho albums, and focuses more on the Total Sonic Energy Transfusion (TSEF) inherent in the music than on its fashion-, hipness- or clarity (FHC) factor. This is not an album you can date by the plug-ins or the loops, it's an organically grown product from our friends at Friendly Farmers Trondheim, that will free your mind and beautify your booty! Shake it, grrl, Shake it! Whoo!! (eh,sorry...got a little carried away there...). OK. Some art-forms feel more true the less refined they are. This statement is definitely relevant where rock music - art or not - is concerned, and Motorpsycho are hereby proving it. As they sing in the album opener 'No Evil': "I'm never quite as brilliant as I am when I am dumb", and amen to that. Grown up sensibility, but juvenile energy: Rock music at it's best! The only sensible things MP themselves have to say about the record, are that 'it's probably too long', 'it was an intense experience to make it as a duo, we felt like a WWF tag-team!', and a variety of the other sportsmans-like platitudes musicians like to blather on about when trying to be profound. One gets a distinct impression that it's far easier for MP to do what they do than to talk about it, and we have heard from very reliable sources that it's "far better to listen to their music than to hear them talk". The boys themselves actually have procured notes from their elders asking that they be excused from interviews this term, and who are we to dispute the wisdom in that?