Motortijd

from the June 2018 edition of Rolling Stone magazine:

MOOCHING IN STEREO

The unnecessary return of Motortijd.

Who thought this was a good idea?  A 30th anniversary heavy-vinyl “deluxe” reissue of an album (well, the album) by Dutch band Motortijd.  Does it hold up?  A better question:  did it ever?

For those unfamiliar with the rock and pop scene in the Netherlands during the 1980s, Motortijd started as a relatively successful regional tribute to The Cars, that seminal new wave and pop rock band from Boston which was recently (and much belatedly, in this critic’s opinion) inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  In an attempt to keep with the “car” theme, drummer Daan De Jong allegedly named the band “Motor Time!” (the punctuation was dropped for stylistic reasons) under the mistaken belief that American auto race marshals traditionally made such an announcement to indicate that the drivers should switch on their ignitions.  The story goes that after two years of making the club circuit covering songs from The Cars’ first four albums, the band decided it might be time to attempt some original material.   Lead singers Sem Van Dijk and Thijs Visser holed up in Groningen over the spring of 1988 penning a dozen tunes that they apparently believed reflected an entirely new direction for the band, and in late May the band entered Rondgat Studios in Eindhoven to record what became their eponymous album.

Released exclusively in Holland in June 1988, the album is not exactly “bad”—it is just blatantly derivative of the Cars songs the band had been methodically gigging over the prior two years.  Engineered by Belgian R. Peterman—better known for his ambient recordings featuring dogs—the record has hints of Roy Thomas Baker’s lush production (some would say overproduction).  Songs like “Femke-A” and “Make It Up” are reasonably catchy, and the band plainly gave everything they had (even though Motortijd’s guitarist Lars Smit, who had a mostly prosthetic left hand due to an unfortunate typewriter mishap, could not even approximate Elliot Easton’s wizardry).  The main problem was that they almost seemed to have made a list of dozens of key elements in The Cars’ oeuvre and then played “spin the jenever” to pick six or seven nuggets to include in each “original” song.  A prime example is the Side Two starter “Everything You Want”—a casual listen to this song (purportedly the tale of Visser getting hustled by a local lady while on holiday in Phuket) discloses lifts from at least five Cars songs.  Totally unoriginal.  And don’t get me started on the second LP of studio outtakes included in this “collectors” package.  Definitely not just what I needed.

And what’s with the album artwork?  Rather than trying to do a credible riff on a classic Vargas pinup or an American muscle car, the band chose for the front cover a strange painting of what appears to be a tulip farmer (who may also moonlight as an amateur arm wrestler) checking her mascara before taking the truck out to inspect the crops.  Weird.  The back cover is even more bizarre, featuring a Brady Bunch-style matrix of what appear to be Polaroid photos of nine different female hands in various “poses.”   (It has been reported that Van Dijk, attempting to channel his hero Ric Ocasek, insisted on only dating models--more particularly, models who had escaped from the then-collapsing Soviet Bloc; however, due to Van Dijk’s owlish early Greg Hawkes glasses and his fondness for morning raw herring and onions, his success generally was limited to hand models, notably Bulgarians.)

Someone (whether a surviving band member or whatever unfortunate entity is now stuck with the Motortijd “catalog”) plainly attempted to capitalize on The Cars’ Hall of Fame induction by releasing this nothingburger.  Kinda sad.  Heartburn City.

-- L.B.