Despite a band name that could have ended up as a subtitle in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, the new project from Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi (both also from rock outfit, the Men) doesn’t drift by ethereally. Hypnotized is an album of flesh-and-blood sounds, mostly, and often prefers to stomp than it does to drift. Sure, there’s enough gauze to justify the band’s name, but this is less about hazy edges than it is about setting new parameters for their sound.
This is a good time for Perro and Chiericozzi to fully indulge in some musical tangents. The Men’s 2012 album New Moon explored links between punk and classic-rock traditions fruitfully, but this year’s Tomorrow’s Hits seemed to vacillate indecisively between those poles, distancing them more than bringing them together. As Dream Police, the duo indulges in a different set of influences and sometimes find some pretty interesting new ground. The opening title track builds on rippling, distorted guitars that can’t help but call to mind the Jesus & Mary Chain. But where that band stretched their songs out into the atmosphere, “Hypnotized” digs into the turf. With blistering fills and thumping drums, the song scratches out scars between the airy synthesizers in its background. “My Mama’s Dead” similarly turns the mesmerizing into the sinister. The Kraut-rock insistence of the rhythm section lures you in, and then buzzing atmospherics, pulled-taut guitar hooks, and distorted vocals knock out odd dents in the seemingly uniform composition.
Dream Police’s greatest strength is this: making shiny tunes and then scuffing them up. The album starts by wandering into the miasmic fuzz of space-rock, but “Iris” turns towards dusty desert rock to brilliant effect. Along with country-ballad closer “Sandy” and blues-rock epic “John”, these songs most closely resemble paths traveled with the Men. Here, though, the explorations feel fresh, as these songs carve out beautiful echoing space the same way the early songs can fill it up. The band mixed this record the week after the release of Tomorrow’s Hits, and in these more exciting moments, you can hear Perro and Chiericozzi happy to explore new territory, to try on new sounds, to record under a new name and, thus, feel free of the dynamic and aesthetic of their usual band. In these moments, Hyponotized feels like a fresh start and a new direction that could distort itself and worm its way into the Men’s future work or wander down its own weird path for quite a while.
Other moments on the record, though, stumble down that weird road. Adding drum machines to “Pouring Rain” set the band in a new direction for the album, but the song itself feels more like preamble than a fully formed moment on its own. The echoing guitars could have come from a number of Flock of Seagulls’ songs, and when they do finally open up into more tangled hooks, the effects smudge the notes so much that the guitars feel too syrupy to deliver any lasting hooks. There’s plenty of keyboards around those guitars, but they crowd more than they flesh out. “All We Are” is the shortest song on the record, but even at under three minutes feels like it runs out of steam. It strives for the nocturnal dust of better songs on the record, but instead epic guitar groans and organ noodling sound less atmospheric and more crowded. “Let It Be” doubles down on many of the shortcomings of “Pouring Rain”, except the mix champions the keys over the guitars.
Oddly enough, these songs sound like sonic outliers, and yet they seem to miss because their oddness is only skin deep. The airy keys and drum machines are doing much of what “Hypnotized” is doing, just less effectively. Still, it’s hard not to see these moments as noble missteps in service to a larger move towards new directions. Dream Police feels here like its own project, like a stand-alone band just getting started. With that feeling comes excitement and discovery, but also a learning curve.