Tom Petty:
Hypnotic Eye:
Reprise:
CD/LP:
Out Now:
★★★★★★★☆☆☆
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Forever hovering around the fringes of the UK's rock-scene, Tom Petty is nevertheless the master of understated blues-rock and electric country, a purveyor of hard-bitten stompers and the occasional heartfelt biographical ballad.
Although his dalliance with global domination has long since passed - both Full Moon Fever and Into The Great Wide Open earned him (and The Heartbreakers on the latter) kudos and grand sales on both sides of the Atlantic in 1989 and 1991 respectively - Petty can still riff with the best of them combining smokey dialogue with hardship-soaked melodies.
Hypnotic Eye is exactly as you'd expect from Petty, little has changed although there's a definite improvement over 2010's Mojo which, while not a bad album, was somewhat samey in places. American Dream Plan B kicks off the album with a somewhat muffled drawl and simplistic chorus, before leading into some of the man's better offerings in recent times. Fault Line is rock and roll quality through and through, while the soft-shoe shuffle of Full Grown Boy leans back, kicks off its shoes and pours a tall cool one. More melodic riffing fills All You Can Carry with some semblance of menace before Power Drunk visits more familiar electric-blues territory.
Hypnotic Eye raises few eyebrows and sets out its stall by the middle of the album and, with the exception of the breezy Sins Of My Youth, it isn't until the excellent epic curtain-call Shadow People that service is fully resumed with a song that sounds like any number of contemporaries might be having a crack at it before long. For some unexplainable reason, I can hear Marianne Faithfull growling her way through this, it's a sound choice.
Album number thirteen borrows from the past to provide for the future, a key fusion of the old and the new making perfect whoopee.
Hypnotic Eye:
Reprise:
CD/LP:
Out Now:
★★★★★★★☆☆☆
Although his dalliance with global domination has long since passed - both Full Moon Fever and Into The Great Wide Open earned him (and The Heartbreakers on the latter) kudos and grand sales on both sides of the Atlantic in 1989 and 1991 respectively - Petty can still riff with the best of them combining smokey dialogue with hardship-soaked melodies.
Hypnotic Eye is exactly as you'd expect from Petty, little has changed although there's a definite improvement over 2010's Mojo which, while not a bad album, was somewhat samey in places. American Dream Plan B kicks off the album with a somewhat muffled drawl and simplistic chorus, before leading into some of the man's better offerings in recent times. Fault Line is rock and roll quality through and through, while the soft-shoe shuffle of Full Grown Boy leans back, kicks off its shoes and pours a tall cool one. More melodic riffing fills All You Can Carry with some semblance of menace before Power Drunk visits more familiar electric-blues territory.
Hypnotic Eye raises few eyebrows and sets out its stall by the middle of the album and, with the exception of the breezy Sins Of My Youth, it isn't until the excellent epic curtain-call Shadow People that service is fully resumed with a song that sounds like any number of contemporaries might be having a crack at it before long. For some unexplainable reason, I can hear Marianne Faithfull growling her way through this, it's a sound choice.
Album number thirteen borrows from the past to provide for the future, a key fusion of the old and the new making perfect whoopee.