Motocrossed – Drown (Country Girl)

Self-released

There’s been no shortage of noise made about bands from North Carolina this year. From Fust and Blue Cactus to Colin Miller and Wednesday, it’s been a banner year for the Cheerwine State. If you read enough music blogs, you might be tired of hearing about the region, but as a one-time resident of NC, it feels like my music nerdly duty to tell you about one more: Motocrossed.

Situated within Charlotte, Motocrossed find themselves somewhere between the artsy enclave out in Asheville and the college-fueled energy of the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill Triangle. If you were to look at a picture of the band, you might be surprised to learn that they’re seven members strong; a composition that puts them more in line with bombastic indie rock like Black Country, New Road or the come-one-come-all sloshiness of Florry – two bands that feel like particularly apt comparisons for the upstart NC group. 

Released at the tail end of August, “Yearning” served as the first official taste of recorded music from Motocrossed and sets the table beautifully. Centered around Blaire Fullagar’s creaky, endearing voice, the song gradually unfurls, deploying a tasty twangy rock passage, a post-rock build, and a towering wall of distortion that the band uses to underline lyrics like “I-277 smells like laundry.” One line later, a Purple Mountains name-drop makes it clear where this band is coming from, even if the lyrics are questioning how much one actually wants to be like David Berman. 

If “Yearning” felt a little expected coming from an alt-country band, “Drown (Country Girl)” is here to disprove you of that notion with swirls of violin and saxophone that make for a beautifully ornate instrumental feast. Finding calm in the abject chaos, the opening lines feel particularly relevant as Fullagar extends a simple yet compassionate offer, singing, “Do you wanna walk and laugh along the streetlights? / We can just talk and pretend everything’s fine.” As a night with friends gives way to a morning of routine work, the group finds resolution in feeling tired and broke, knowing that the people in their lives are the ones who make this all worth it. 

Across the covers for these two singles, we see a cute stitched Motocrossed flag that acts as a stand-in for the group’s homespun approach to making music. With a collection of songs recorded in homes and basements, centered around a group that rolls seven members deep (plus another six whose contributions were listed as “extra puzzle pieces” on the Bandcamp page), it really feels as if Motocrossed is less of a band and more of an expansive art collective capable of capturing immense sounds and ideas. Hell, we’ve already seen that on these first two singles. Their music is compelling and honest, but doesn’t take itself too seriously - an important balance for any good rock band to strike. Most tellingly, the cover for their upcoming self-titled record depicts a pastoral scene of two animals running around a field, but within that landscape is a lacy heart frame where we see a woman in bed with a Motocross bike, flanked on either side by posters for Liz Phair’s Whip-Smart and Broken Social Scene’s self-titled album. If that doesn’t do anything for you, then I think you’re beyond saving.