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Human Highway work best in this inviting, flickering-campfire headspace, and for an amiable if ephemeral 40 minutes, Moody Motorcycle offers a pleasant soundtrack to the dwindling days of the summer.
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It is nice to hear a pop record like Moody Motorcycle, not just to wind down the summer, but to combat some other indie rock trends.
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Alternative PressWe're fans of Thorburn's day job, too, but this actually wins out when it comes to Sunday relaxation tunes. [Oct 2008, p.153]
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What is plainer throughout is that someone has finally delivered a follow-up to the Beach Boys' "Friends" album, dwelling on moments and sensibilities that slip past most of us in the normal course of a day.
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It’s just the sort of gently strummed, sweetly harmonized and vaguely familiar-sounding pop music replete with quirky lyrical turns that is designed to make indie-rock-obsessed music hacks swoon. And they will.
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Moody Motorcycle is a deft reappropriation and re-imagining of the harmonic pop of the Everly Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
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The title track gusts in more forcefully, but on the duo's best songs, they harmonize like Simon & Garfunkel shutting their eyes against approaching shades of winter.
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While enduring a few accidents, the group’s fresh folk approach shows promise.
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Moody Motorcycle is easily Thorburn's least ambitious effort, evidenced by the inclusion of song sketches like 'Ode to Abner' and tracks that seem like outtakes from his Islands work (for example, the title cut and 'Pretty Hair'), and yet in its many moments of off-the-cuff beauty the album proves, perhaps even more than the meticulously executed "Arm's Way," the extraordinary talents of this oft-misunderstood Canadian.