Human Eye - A Garage-Punk Pandemonium

In the beginning, there were Clone Defects, intriguing disciples of the Stooges gospel and of that whole punk-and-everything-around-it rabble that wreaked havoc pretty much everywhere during the Seventies. Leading them was a true stage animal: Timmy "Vulgar" Lampinen, unhinged enough to shut the whole thing down after a couple of records and launch, in 2004, a fierce new project, embarking on an arty crossing of one of the wildest, most deranged and racket-making garage sounds that history can recall.

That joker Timmy tells it like this: "Johnny (Lzr, the keyboardist; ed.) and I met at a Clone Defects show, and when I ended that adventure and found out he had these weird pedals for making noise, I immediately decided to start playing with him. As for Billy (that is, Hurricane William a.k.a. Billy Tornado - drums, percussion, sax; ed.), I ran into him here in Detroit, at the Magic Stick, and I told him: 'You sure look like a drummer' and he said: 'Yeah, I'm a drummer'... and after a few rehearsals I immediately thought: 'Holy shit! He's the right man!'"

With the arrival of Thommy Hawk on bass, Human Eye were born. And the sparks finally ignited a blinding fire, raising the band to the level of Michigan's finest outfits. By now tired of the usual punk rummaging, Timmy had decided, once and for all, to turn his main inspirations upside down: "I was sick to death of those two or three chords... Now, anything strange and crazy can influence me..."

Tied by an unbreakable thread to the most "out" and elusive experiences of American new wave (the underground and experimental strain, to be clear, of the likes of Chrome, Mirrors, Screamers, Debris', etc., where the punk element would often painfully collide with a furious destructive streak, papering the sound with lo-fi synthetic shrieks and blows from outer space), the Detroit quartet were immediately snapped up by L.A.'s In The Red, debuting in 2005 with the self-titled Human Eye (12 tracks; 31:32), recorded with the help of Ryan Sabatis of Piranhas.

Worshippers of chaos, tenacious explorers of parallel universes, plunged into a woozy, slovenly atmosphere ("First Taste Of Crime"), Human Eye declare, with this masterpiece of artsy, alien garage-punk, that madness is the only cure for the greyness of day after day. And so it is one blasphemous, delirious succession of sonic infernos after another. As if Debris' were covering the Ramones, deep in withdrawal. Stop & go, thick-headed punk illiteracy, cacophonous meltdowns ("Seymour"). Unleashed psycho-blues stretches, bitten into by dizzyingly out-of-focus little guitars: out of their minds (the title track).

The shadow of Half Japanese looms over the toxic, crippled voodoobilly of "Car Was Alive". The stubborn application of other canons to punk's basic forms goes hand in hand with an ironic, openly mocking attitude. A "punk" that's alive and well, teeming with life and scattering tomfoolery through the messy Chrome/King Snake Roost brawl of "Girl Namned Troble". Heaps of garbage spawned by a popular-music civilization chasing dreams of glory and of a backwards neo-avant-garde through the brain's shortcuts.

Human Eye are the only band (alongside the mighty early Six Finger Satellite) capable of approaching the sound of the Edge/Creed duo and reinvigorating it, freeing every last scrap of its madness with a Dadaist assault ("Age"). Interstellar deliriums and propulsions ("Chew Rat Meat"), heroin-soaked pits and carpets, furious detonations. Cyborgs who won't play along and smash everything to pieces. And then the frenzied use of "aleatory elements" (synth bubbles, metallic conflagrations, barrages of noise, etc.) straight out of the Pere Ubu handbook.

Timmy "Vulgar" is yet another mask of the anti-vocalist: a monster; a blasphemous actor in the theatre of cruelty of his most visceral emotions. A Beefheart fed on nothing but junk-culture (just listen to the "industrial" bedlam of "Kill Pop Culture" - "I'm gonna kill Eminem with a pair of sheers/ Electrical rollium guitar attack with ear piercing noise" - the slashes, the wreckage and the insane whirlwinds of a sound mercilessly deformed, and try to make sense of any of it using reason alone...). An acid-fried shaman leading a band of troglodytes, wielding musical instruments like battle axes ("Episode People"), leaving behind a long trail of horrors, all the way to the rambling free-rock of "Tim Continuum".

Troglodytes who, just when you least expect it, surprise you with avant-jazz wonders, conceived as a filthy black hole, a squalid poetry of sonic waste, a grimy frenzy that pours all its abstraction into yet another amphetamine-fuelled pit ("Sly Glass Foam", kicked off by a glorious cosmic free-jazz conclave). A journey into the most radical and creative recesses of rock. A journey with no return: "Extraterrtrial March".

With this masterpiece out in the world, the band toured the globe bringing along their frenzied live show ("I want to put together the greatest live set anyone's ever seen," Timmy declares, megalomaniac as ever), and didn't get back into the studio until 2007 (with new entry Brad Hales on bass), recording the 7" Dinosaur Bones and the two singles Spiders and Their Kin/Desperate Hands and Rare Little Creature/Self Transforming Machine Elves — material that's more or less interesting across the board, and while on one hand it helps regurgitate certain Clone Defects echoes (see, for instance, "Hologram" from "Dinosaur Bones" or "Spiders And Their Kin"), on the other it already points to new directions, new worlds to explore (the sidereal skirmish of "Self Transforming Machine Elves" is exceptional, one of their absolute peaks).

So, while word spreads that the band is busy recording a new album, in the first half of 2008 they self-release the appetizer to Serpent Shadow, an EP on cd-r containing three tracks (barely twenty-three minutes of music) in which the band carries out an alienating, lysergic stretching of its sound, briefly revealing a mysterious shamanic streak too. Still, the opener "Vagobon" immediately keeps ties with the recent past firmly in place, with its dazed sludge of space-rock and lysergic mucilage.

Then, with the title track, we're catapulted right into the middle of a deranged, out-of-focus jam, recorded on some cheap walkman and entirely devoted to staging a hypothetical exchange of views between early-Eighties Jad Fair and the filthiest Stones. And, when it comes to "alienation", a "Universe Nurse" captured live in Denmark might do even better: the stage is a genuine battlefield, and good old Timmy really does come across, at more than one point, as some new devil smitten with strange colored pills. All in all: still a great listen, even if, when it comes down to it, not everything always works to perfection.

Hugely anticipated, the announced Fragments Of The Universe Nurse (10 tracks; 42:58) is finally released by Oakland's Hook Or Crook in early August, an album on which the rascals return to the scene of the crime with their usual ferocious nerve: it's still amphetamine-fueled art-garage/punk mayhem, but with a taste for electric hallucination and the brutal assembly of wandering musical bodies that's even more shocking and disjointed.

Like a deleterious nightmare made of sickly proto-wave (the Electric Eels, for one, also answer the call), go-go devolution, labyrinths of sonic madness à la Men's Recovery Project, and an increasingly infected cocktail of junk-culture and sci-fi spasms, Human Eye push forward, filthy and possessed, through a pandemonium of diabolical, fluorescent infatuations, turning the merciless deliriums of their debut into a futuristic kaleidoscope of stunning epileptic fits, Hawkwind-style intergalactic jolts ("Slop Culture"), Godzilla lasers and tangles of bloodied strings — Arto Lindsay, if you're out there, feel free to chime in... — ("Gorilla Garden"). And behind them, a desert of smoking rubble, ghost towns where crackling little radios broadcast some of the most deteriorated, brutal garage-punk ever committed to tape, while the last scraps of humanity fade away wondering what the point of this shitty life even is ("Salimander Soft Shoez", a Honeymoon Killers-style abomination with limping, primitivist vertigo).

In these frenzied, visceral bacchanals, the keyboards trace crazed, thread-thin spirals, the accelerations are sudden and maniacal (conjuring, in "Two Headed Woman", the Iguana in the grip of electroshock), the instruments stagger along at a boorish ramalama pace ("Step Into New Dimensions"), and in "Lightning in Her Eyes" teenage sloppiness slides along the ridge of a pseudo-Middle-Eastern grotesque that recalls Tragic Mulatto's "Hot Man Pussy" period. Then "Dinosaur Bones" kicks in and the revelation is complete: freaked-out synth-punk to scream along to at the top of your lungs... because stuff like this could, sooner or later, end up as the soundtrack to your own sacred day of ordinary madness.

It's clear, in short, that these gentlemen's state of mind is a tad altered: strange creatures populate their minds like ugly, dirty & nasty tenants, so much so that even we, thinking ourselves immune, end up entangled in the circular web of "Rare Little Creature", finding ourselves buried in some infernal circle, with Timmy always ready to poke our backsides with a red-hot pitchfork...

Not a moment's respite: carpet bombing, a tangle of punches square in the face, a vicious, unstoppable storm of excitement. Right up to the epic, ritualistic procession of "Poison Frog People", proud and cocky to the beat of martial percussion, leaving, at last, the title track the honor of bringing down (quite literally) the curtain, amid fireworks, crippled sounds, truculent floods of organ and guitars smashed mercilessly to the ground.

After the interlude of Rise Of The Green Gorilla with Lampinen's side project Timmy's Organism, 2011 brings They Came From The Sky (8 tracks; 30:26) on Sacred Bones, an album that adds little or nothing to the formula. Still, the appeal of their dazed/bizarre/orgiastic jams remains high, jams in which anything can happen at any moment, swerving dangerously only to end up on intergalactic highways where aliens drive on the wrong side and asteroids whiz by crazier than ever. The psychedelic impact translates, then, into a form of altered visionariness ("Brain Zip (Kickin' Back in the Electric Chair)"), colliding head-on with Hawkwind's space trips ("Impregnate the Martian Queen Pt. 2", which boasts more pronounced percussion work thanks to the use of congas) and with the sacred MC5-Stooges dyad (the hellish, dynamite-laden "Junkyard Heart"). "The Movie Was Real" and, in part, "Serpent Shadow" instead accentuate the more hypnotic side of their art. The six minutes of the closing title track, meanwhile, condense all the ingredients of a sound that has by now fully matured.

In 2013, it's the turn of 4: Into Unknown, with which Timmy decides to widen his range of solutions, opening straight away with a swamp-rock in disguise that tinkers with lysergic excess ("Gettin' Mean"). The usual rough rowdiness and a drunken swagger that's never merely an end in itself soak the record through and through — thoroughly enjoyable, unable to reach the heights of the past, yet still mature in picking the right outfits from the most varied wardrobes.

So we get tributes-cum-outrages to the Rolling Stones ("Alligator Dance"), ballads by moonlight — albeit with the moon just a couple of meters away ("Immortal Soldier", whose guitar coda chases cosmic nostalgia), hyperspace folk-rock ("Surface Of Pluto"), the Stooges of "raw power" ("Buzzin' Flies") or a bulked-up Cramps ("Juicy Jaw"). At the end come the longer tracks: "Outlaw Lone Wolf", in which Timmy tries his hand at western epic with progressive-tinged touches, telling the story of an orphan raised by the Apaches who ends up becoming a great warrior; "Into Unknown", a contemplative instrumental that looks back from above over the whole journey taken, gazing beyond the backdrop at the kaleidoscopic spirit of a boundless sonic past, embellished with an endless series of electric-electronic scribbles, in the vein of the most far-out American new wave.

In the great melting pot of the punk-garage revival — which in recent years has spawned bands of varying interest (Hunches, Piranhas, Reigning Sound, the early Hospitals, etc.) — Human Eye, in short, keep flying the flag of a tremendously personal sound, one capable of transfiguring human alienation into a perpetual, white-hot yearning for dissolution.

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