HUMAN EYE - 4: Into Unknown

Recently busy under the Timmy's Organism banner, Timmy "Vulgar" Lampinen finally returns to his greatest love, Human Eye, with whom he's reached the fourth chapter of a gripping sci-fi garage-punk saga.

With "4: Into Unknown", though, the Detroit madman has decided to widen his palette, opening straight away with a swamp-rock number in disguise that fiddles with lysergic excess ("Gettin' Mean"). The usual rough-edged rowdiness and a drunken swagger that's never really an end in itself soak through an album that's thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish - unable to scale the heights of the past, yet still mature in its knack for picking the right outfit from the most varied wardrobes.

So we get homages-cum-outrages to the Rolling Stones ("Alligator Dance"), moonlit ballads - with the moon just a couple of metres away ("Immortal Soldier", whose guitar coda chases cosmic nostalgia) - hyperspace folk-rock ("Surface Of Pluto"), the "raw power" Stooges ("Buzzin' Flies") or a bulked-up Cramps ("Juicy Jaw"). At the tail 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 grows up to become a great warrior; "Into Unknown", a contemplative instrumental that looks back from above over the whole journey travelled, aiming beyond the horizon at the kaleidoscopic spirit of a boundless sonic past, embellished with an endless string of electric-electronic doodles, in the vein of the freakiest American new wave.

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16/06/2013