With the triumphant release of their second full-length album on Hook or Crook Records this month, Detroit's Human Eye have re-emerged as one of the world's last real examples of avant garde punk music, and retain their status as the yardstick by which all real rock'n'roll weirdness should be measured. As far back as 2004, these oblique creatures of the darkest, most unlit spaces in the universe have carved out their very own caveman-cum-alien formula of sickening science fiction sounds. Withstanding lineup changes and label rearrangements, they've succeeded in baring the frayed edges of their own sanity and creating something truly awe-inspiring with each successive release. Although it was evident at the closing of the Clone Defects' tenure of domination, lead lunatic Timmy Vulgar had too much erratic energy and mongoloid moxie to stay dormant for long, and after a mind-blowing debut LP on In The Red, and the subsequent 7"s on Ypsilanti, Cass, and Disordered devolved the band into a glob of artistically explosive guts and entrails, their efforts at finding a new home for their controlled insanity have now come to fruition, and we can all breathe easier.
With Sir Vulgar's deeply demonic bellow in full swing, Human Eye's cavalcade of boundary-defying sound construction lifts off and streaks across the sky with serrated rhythms not right for this world. And along with the doom-laden disasterously disemboweling synthesizer squeal, it works together carefully to crack your closed mind back open, just as it should. As one of the most theatric bands on stage in America, Human Eye rival the Alice Cooper stage show without much competition, and even with dead mollusks, fish guts, and squid ink aside, they are as inimitable as ever in their current state, and remain untouchable within the confines of a typical rock show spectacle. But just as you could say that the theatrics are aimed at distracting you from their own guttural punk dimension, the other-worldly songs forged out of broken light bulb pieces and the slime from expired lunchmeat does wonders to the unaffected brain and causes tiny lesions that absorb all the filth and dementia uttered from Vulgar's tortured trachea and reinforce the fact that Human Eye are undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of unique modern music. Blazing their own path has never been the easiest route, and their method may never transpire the outer regions of the wrong wave, but they have never needed any ulterior motivation to do their biding and it's without any restraint that we wholly recommend their worldly droppings, in every state of recorded medium. Pick up your copy of Fragments of the Universe Nurse on LP or CD direct from Hook or Crook right HERE and revel in the off-centered true oddity that is one of the Midwest's most precious resources, the living nightmare that is Human Eye.
