Band of The Month: Motopony Hone Psych-Pop Excellence With 'Buffalo Medicine'

Leaping from the folk heart of their eponymous 2011 debut album, Motopony – Seattle’s wildly promising sextet export – have fought through an evolutionary battlefield of lineup changes, personal turmoil and professional upheaval, relentlessly driven to a higher purpose. Now, with a new album on the horizon on the heels of last year’s immensely promising Idle Beauty EP, we’re thrilled to bring Motopony into the fold as Crave’s Band of The Month for November.

Lead guitarists Mike Notter and Nate Daley shape the perimeters of sound alongside the immersive rhythmic vertebrae of drummer Forrest Mauvais and bassist/synth-maestro Terry Mattson, as Andrew Butler’s fingerwork on keys delivers an ethereal sheen. Frontman Daniel Blue, starry-eyed Bohemian-poet ringleader, pulls the sound to a rich psychedelic-pop center and sets the energy exchange in motion between listener and creator. The band’s arena-baiting indie-psych design is an overgrown crossroads between Cold War Kids, The Black Keys and the sounds of seasoned musicians tripping their balls off in the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest. As they prep their sophomore full-length, slated for release in spring 2015, they’ve teamed with producer Mike McCarthy (Spoon, Heartless Bastards, Trail Of The Dead) to shape the proper frequency.

The path has been all but linear, however, for the collective MTV called ‘the best band ever’ (Sure, MTV is a dogshit channel with barely any connection to music, but someone in the office apparently still listens to music, and knows a damn good thing when they hear it). During the recording process for the new album, the label Motopony were signed to went bankrupt, they parted ways with their manager, lost two band members and a producer, and endured a massive legal battle for the rights to their own songs. Add a baby to the mix, family tragedies, three new band members and a barrage of peripheral circumstance, and you’ve got yourself a depth of turbulence by which most bands would – and should – met their demise. Undeterred, Motopony took it all on the chin, however, and the sonic results are an undoubtedly hard-won testimony of a greater artistic purpose.

We recently met up with Motopony at legendary drummer Matt Sorum’s home studio in Los Angeles for an intimate CraveOnstage session, and caught lightning in a bottle, as evidenced by the hypnotic swell of “Buffalo Medicine” below.

Check back next week for another exclusive session with Motopony, as well as an in-depth interview with the guys. In the meantime, keep up with the band at their official site, as well as on Facebook.