Morex Optimo

By Billy Donald, Rock Interviews (more articles from this author) 2003-04-17

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Artist: Morex Optimo (www.morexoptimo.com)
Title: Morex Optimo

Cleanly birthed and packaged in 1999, Brooklyn, NY's Morex Optimo offers a surprisingly fresh perspective of musical textures and melodies wrapped into a nice series of 3-4 minute short stories set to a twisted pastiche of rapidly changing time signatures, and sometimes dissonant key changes accompanied with dandy little limericks about such things as Kosmonauts and Long Jack Mackinac. But please think not of them as silly troubadours that concocted all of their lyrics in a drunken haze at the local watering hole. Beneath the layer of well harmonized vocals of bassmeister Yuri Weber and guitarist Kristofer Widholm lies some serious musicianship via Widholm's clean surfish guitar, Weber's thumping bass, and the slick, syncopated drumming of Heather Wagner.

For a good example, check the quirky Big Tongued Man, ! which is in a hopping little signature of 7/4. Heather's solid drumming anchors things down for Yuri to play a great descending bass line while Widholm's guitar conjures thoughts of a distant cousin of beach favorites such as Pipeline and Misirlou.

Reginald Bach The Compleat is another fine example of a well-crafted tune musically, and again, the harmonies do impress.

Long Jack Mackinac is a fun little tune complete with a little pickin' and grinnin' by Widholm and lyrics and vocalizations that seemed to have come s! traight from Les Claypool, but the music punches you in the gut with a solid 4/4 when you least expect it during the choruses and bridges. Check again the way Wagner's drumming seamlessly zips through each twist of the song. The girl can rock!

It would be easy for a lot of people to write off Morex Optimo as ìdork rockî or ìcollege rockî. Trust me, the fine folks of Morex Optimo don't take themselves too seriously, and they let the music breathe and have fun with it, but there is too much talent within the band to call them college rock. College rock would be a bunch of putz's in ballcaps and Fudpucker's shirts trying to slur their way into their best Dave Matthews impersonation. Morex Optimo not only cuts their own path, it's possible that they may smoke the trimmings they leave behind. It's the most fun you will ever have with a trio of dorks.

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