“A towering two-hour concept work on a Norse saga scale.” Motorpsycho and Ståle Storlokken’s The Death Defying Unicorn is a “battered, barnacled beauty.”

Originally penned with Elephant9 keyboardist Ståle Storlokken for the 2010 Molde Jazz festival, and featuring the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, …Unicorn is a towering two-hour concept work on a Norse saga scale.

Based on the true story of the whaleship Essex (see Moby-Dick/Mastodon’s Leviathan), with Hollow Earth theories and Utopian fiction as fuel, a powerful fable is tracked by familiar ’Psycho rock flavours, classical figures and jazz. Introducing itself with a Gershwin-like clarinet glide (Out Of The Woods) gushing into a saxed-out/Mahavishnued The Hollow Lands, cabin boy character Thomas Nickerson recalls his recruitment (‘they nabbed me poaching last spring/Said I’d sail or swing’). From here we follow doomed vessel Through The Veil – MC5 jazz-rock into Sabbath – across Prokofiev-like Doldrums and on Into The Gyre, a Beach Boys/Mars Volta meld that floats away on Flotsam.

Disc two – or side three on vinyl – peters a little, reflecting the elegiac darkness of the crew’s travails until Mutiny! supplies a galloping, Yes-propelled lifeboat that launches the superb finale Into The Mystic. Here Ola Kvernberg’s exquisite violin recalls Jean-Luc Ponty’s joyous Zappa handiwork over muscular ritornellos and an uplifting string and Moog-driven resolution.

A battered, barnacled beauty.

Jo is a journalist, podcaster, event host and music industry lecturer with 23 years in music magazines since joining Kerrang! as office manager in 1999. But before that Jo had 10 years as a London-based gig promoter and DJ, also working in various vintage record shops and for the UK arm of the Sub Pop label as a warehouse and press assistant. Jo’s had tea with Robert Fripp, touched Ian Anderson’s favourite flute (!), asked Suzi Quatro what one wears under a leather catsuit, and invented several ridiculous editorial ideas such as the regular celebrity cooking column for Prog, Supper’s Ready. After being Deputy Editor for Prog for five years and Managing Editor of Classic Rock for three, Jo is now Associate Editor of Prog, where she’s been since its inception in 2009, and a regular contributor to Classic Rock. She continues to spread the experimental and psychedelic music-based word amid unsuspecting students at BIMM Institute London, hoping to inspire the next gen of rock, metal, prog and indie creators and appreciators.