The Motorz "Guaranteed" (15.3 MB) from All Night Long The Annex Madison, WI July 5, 2007

In between the halves of their nationwide tour, the Box Social stopped home for a week and played a show at the Annex, with local rockers the Motorz opening -- if you missed it, they'll reprise their pairing on September 13. It was an interesting match-up, I thought, providing me my first opportunity to see the Motorz. Madison has always struck me as having a stratified local rock scene -- permanent, college and high school -- with not much overlap, and there are a lot of bands in the permanent level who generally produce a kind of music I don't like. There's this straight-ahead hard rock approach that strikes me almost entirely aesthetic, married as it often is to a separate-bedrooms 60's britpop aesthetic. The Motorz recently took this to its logical extreme, by releasing two albums -- one harder and one poppier. As it happens, the pop material they played at this show was pretty good. The harmonies and crunchy melody lines didn't break much new ground, but they were nice to listen to and I'll probably pick that record up after I get home. The rock material did a lot less for me, but then so does that stuff's inspirational material.