Hypnos 69
Legacy

THE REVIEW

Eclectic and concrete, two qualities I would attribute to Hypnos 69. There are various facets of the Rock scene that coherently fit within the music of the Belgian Band, with song structures halfway between an instinctive Psychedelic/Progressive flow that has embraced with pleasure certain characteristics of 90s Rock and occasionally stoner-like guitar work. It is no coincidence that they collaborated on splits with Colour Haze first and Monkey 3 later.

  "The Eclectic Measure" is the album with which I began to know and appreciate them, and it literally left me stunned by the presence of enchanting tracks, most notably "Halfway To The Stars", poignant and memorable in its delicate melody, which brought to mind the attitude, but also the singing, of Motorpsycho or their compatriots dEUS. Such cases make you realize how futile it can be to argue about the specific genre of a work, but if we're here writing and discussing, sometimes it's also nice to rack our brains a little once in a while.

  Hypnos 69 returned in 2010 with "Legacy",  still produced by the delightful ElektroHasch record label. The splendid opening and closing Suites of the album are the moments most akin to the romantic Rock in their discography, where brass and a neurotic Sax interlude precede acid guitar solos in a Hackett-like fashion, supported by the indispensable Mellotron soundscape. A biting Sax and a vocal delivery with a schizoid Crimsonian flavor, immersed in the evocation of 70s underground Rock—primarily Black Widow in this case—appear instead in "An Aerial Architect". An album that also offers its most hypnotic moments, interspersed with brief Jazz-Rock sections, somewhat as if Lemmy’s Hawkwind were making leaps across the various lands of Fripp’s court, traversing some esoteric Sinfieldian landscapes to overwhelming and unsettling Starlessian guitars. An album that leaves behind the melancholy, the "brevity" and some characteristics of the tracks from the previous work, making room for symphonic evocations of Progressive Rock, while maintaining the quality and engagement of the work unchanged.