Sadly, Thee Hypnotics remain candidates for anyone’s ‘Criminally Overlooked’ list, but the re-release of this, their second album from 1990, alongside a crackin’ piece in a recent issue of Shindig! By editor Jon ‘Mojo’ Mills (and if you’re not picking up Shindig! I’d suggest you sit quietly for a bit and think about what you’re doing) may go some way to addressing this injustice.
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; ‘Unearthed’ and ‘Sonic Lament’, 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. ‘Half Man Half Boy’ thunders in as vocalist Jim Jones (latterly of his much lauded Revue) fills us in at where he’s at, ‘I feel so wired, please won’t you help me come down’. The liquid blues/rock bongwater is punctuated by the kind of herculean drum salvos that make one realise just how often the adjective ‘awesome’ is overused.
‘All Messed Up’ 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. ‘Release The Feeling’ 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 rock, none more so than the hardworking ‘Resurrection Joe’, 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 ‘(Let It) Come Down Heavy’. Thee Hypnotics’ immense, rolling anthem represents the disc’s pivotal peak, simply by dint of existing as a unique form of rock’n’roll gigantism that one can only crane to look up at.
The group change tack with ‘Bleeding Heart’, 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. ‘What To Do’ 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.
After ‘Sonic Lament’ spends 100 seconds or so escaping the third rock, the episodic ‘Revolution Stone’ comes as another surprise, opening as it does with a kind of piano/bossa nova thang, before Jones’ 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’s 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 möbius strip made of sound. Eventually, the lengthy work our reaches its conclusion and slumps, exhausted onto the killing floor.
Thee Hypnotics deserve to be remembered. Go forth, grab this album, score yourself a copy of the first Shindig! Quarterly, and do yourself a fucking great favour.
The Hypnotics MySpace: www.myspace.com/theehypnotics
Shindig! Magazine: www.shindig-magazine.com/
