Every so often, some brave or foolish or utterly unhinged band comes along and tries to reinvent punk rock, making the attempt to push the genre in new directions while trying to get the old beast snarling again. While most bands are content to call it a day after roughing things up a little, it’s clear that for Detroit’s
Human Eye, that’s simply not enough. On their third album,
They Came from the Sky, the band doesn’t just get in there and slap punk around a little, but rather they feed it LSD and wail on it with whatever happens to be lying around while shouting that the sky is falling, running the whole thing through some kind of ad hoc MK-ULTRA experiment designed to test the genre’s limits. This psychedelic approach pays off for them as they run the raw power of punk through a garage-psych kaleidoscope, with driving jams like “Alien Freaks” alternating between pedal-to-the-metal intensity and
Zappa-esque space rock freak-outs. What’s really surprising about this stylistic collision is how effortless the whole thing appears to be.
Human Eye isn’t showing off, they’re just letting their freak flag fly and going where the winds take it, as if they’re on a mission to change punk, but they’re not really aware that they’ve been given the job, giving
They Came from the Sky a nonchalant weirdness that’s hard to match. ~ Gregory Heaney