Customer Reviews

Laugh in the Dark

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The late, legendary Greg Shaw's last signing to Bomp is a fitting cap to his career in A&R. This Seattle-based quartet's psych-garage-punk is loud and distorted, with fuzz and reverb duking it out for the soul of the guitars, and vocals that drive the preamps way past their limits. It's a primordial rock 'n' roll experience of blues progressions left to fester in the garage until the guitars and organ mold into a howl and the drums regress to Neanderthal rhythms. There are plenty of antecedents here, including The Sonics, Seeds, Lyres, and Doors, and yet the Invisible Eyes don't sound like a copy of any one of 'em. 3-1/2 stars, if allowed fractional ratings. [©2005 hyperbolium dot com]

Things that go Bump in the night (and Crunch, Shimmy-Shake and Ka-Twang in the Midnight Hour). A lonely organ whines and wheezes from a cold, dark vestibule in the Old Haunted Castle (you know the one, just past the wrong side of the tracks.) Look Out The Invisible Eyes have got you in their sights. Amongst the BUZZ of barflies and stench of stale beer, these Mono-sters creep through dive clubs and dank bars to feast on drugged out kids, beats and punks, too stoned to stay away and too scared to go home. Vocals echo from the farthest corner of the cellar, reverberating and wafting up through a broken lead pipe in the soft pine floorboards. Songs of spite and sorrow - smooth like bourbon, the sour mash songs of specters, mashers and wraiths, blues blackened by the plague of the damned. A fiend fuzz guitar clouds your mind with impure thoughts, then strings you up to dangle in the wind. The Pied Piper of Transylvania Organ tenderly leads you by the cold and clammy hand down into the maelstrom of the 9 Circles of Hades. Train Rhythm churns to dripping faucet time, HISS, CRACKLE, SPAT - like thick-cut, apple-smoked bacon frying in a cast iron skillet. Beware of their insidious seduction; sweet lies, beguiling glances and broken promises, The Invisible Eyes have come for your women and children, who follow blindly and leave willingly (a little more willingly than I would have hoped). They are from the graveyard of the undead; distant 2nd cousins to "The Mummies" and "Groovie Ghoulies", but much closer kissing cousins to "The Oblivions" (`Play 9 songs with Mr. Quinton'), so if that works for you, all the better; if not stick it in your pipe and smoke it. This is a damn good record, if you like your meat still twitching, satiate your carnal blood lust and gnaw on these bones. In the land of the blind, The Invisible Eyes are King; and in the sound of BOMP, The Invisible Eyes have just made their mark. The Invisible Eyes are Outta-Sight!