{"id":1827,"date":"2015-06-05T18:59:47","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T17:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyeplug.net\/magazine\/?p=1827"},"modified":"2011-05-11T16:24:10","modified_gmt":"2011-05-11T16:24:10","slug":"thee-hypnotics-%e2%80%93-come-down-heavy-album-situa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/thee-hypnotics-%e2%80%93-come-down-heavy-album-situa\/","title":{"rendered":"Thee Hypnotics \u2013 Come Down Heavy (album, Situa)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sadly, Thee Hypnotics<\/strong> remain candidates for anyone\u2019s \u2018Criminally Overlooked\u2019 list, but the re-release of this, their second album from 1990, alongside a crackin\u2019 piece in a recent issue of Shindig! <\/em>By editor Jon \u2018Mojo\u2019 Mills (and if you\u2019re not picking up Shindig!<\/em> I\u2019d suggest you sit quietly for a bit and think about what you\u2019re doing) may go some way to addressing this injustice.<\/p>\n

Come Down Heavy <\/em>is a behemoth of an album that presses down upon the senses like 20,000 leagues of heavy water. Aside from two slightly ambient tracks; \u2018Unearthed\u2019 and \u2018Sonic Lament\u2019, which see the quartet indulging in a spot of the kind of crepuscular, wah-wah led noodling that provided respite across early Funkadelic discs, the disc blasts relentlessly along the Blue Cheer range of the audiochromatic spectrum. \u2018Half Man Half Boy\u2019 thunders in as vocalist Jim Jones (latterly of his much lauded Revue) fills us in at where he\u2019s at, \u2018I feel so wired, please won\u2019t you help me come down\u2019. The liquid blues\/rock bongwater is punctuated by the kind of herculean drum salvos that make one realise just how often the adjective \u2018awesome\u2019 is overused.<\/p>\n

\u2018All Messed Up\u2019 is similarly thunderous, an acid\/blues relationship meltdown number that sounds like a Crosstown Traffic pile up adorned by a truly gravity bending Ray Hanson guitar solo. \u2018Release The Feeling\u2019 sees the Stooges mashed against Sir Lord Baltimore as the true sound of derailed hedonism is evoked by Jones broadcasting streams of exultant non-sequiturs across a storm of charged particles. This is muscular <\/em>rock, none more so than the hardworking \u2018Resurrection Joe\u2019, a track so heavy that you can hear it ploughing furrows into your ears while its unstoppable momentum builds and builds. Finally, it reaches a kind of priapic peak, via a strafing solo that blasts the sonic landscape clear for \u2018(Let It) Come Down Heavy\u2019. Thee Hypnotics\u2019 immense, rolling anthem represents the disc\u2019s pivotal peak, simply by dint of existing as a unique form of rock\u2019n\u2019roll gigantism that one can only crane to look up at.<\/p>\n

The group change tack with \u2018Bleeding Heart\u2019, whereupon the sound of sonic quantum physics splashes down in a badass barroom to boogie hard courtesy of some up-tempo goodvibes stompery that carves and cuts its groove, infused by some tasty harp ejaculations. \u2018What To Do\u2019 finds us back in Experience territory, albeit one that has its immense power held in check until we arrive at a bridge section that descends through a series of malign, hellish circles.<\/p>\n

After \u2018Sonic Lament\u2019 spends 100 seconds or so escaping the third rock, the episodic \u2018Revolution Stone\u2019 comes as another surprise, opening as it does with a kind of piano\/bossa nova thang, before Jones\u2019 Morrison-esque vocals kick in and the band shift up through the gears. Here, the vocalist is looking back at rocks past from some distant point in a future that may never come to pass, suddenly he\u2019s Jagger, then extended instrumental passages creep across the air between speaker and ear like flashbacks from the edge of infinity. The track pivots around its mid-point, doubling back upon itself like a m\u00f6bius strip made of sound. Eventually, the lengthy work our reaches its conclusion and slumps, exhausted onto the killing floor.<\/p>\n

Thee Hypnotics deserve to be remembered. Go forth, grab this album, score yourself a copy of the first Shindig! Quarterly<\/em>, <\/em>and do yourself a fucking great favour.<\/p>\n

The Hypnotics MySpace: <\/strong> www.myspace.com\/theehypnotics<\/a><\/p>\n

Shindig! <\/em><\/strong>Magazine: <\/strong> www.shindig-magazine.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Come Down Heavy is a behemoth of an album that presses down upon the senses like 20,000 leagues of heavy water. Aside from two slightly ambient tracks; \u2018Unearthed\u2019 and \u2018Sonic Lament\u2019, which see the quartet indulging in a spot of the kind of crepuscular, wah-wah led noodling that provided respite across early Funkadelic discs, the disc blasts relentlessly along the Blue Cheer range of the audiochromatic spectrum. \u2018Half Man Half Boy\u2019 thunders in as vocalist Jim Jones (latterly of his much lauded Revue) fills us in at where he\u2019s at, \u2018I feel so wired, please won\u2019t you help me come down\u2019. The liquid blues\/rock bongwater is punctuated by the kind of herculean drum salvos that make one realise just how often the adjective \u2018awesome\u2019 is overused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,74,86],"tags":[151,121,246],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-garage","category-reviews","category-rock","tag-dick-porter","tag-eyeplug","tag-thee-hypnotics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1827"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eyeplug.net\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=1827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}