July 29 2014, 6:23 PM ET
by Alfred Soto
Tom Petty would like you to know he’s been doing this shit forever and likely will after the seas consume coastal cities. “I’ve got a dream/ I’m gonna fight till I get it right,” he coos on Hypnotic Eye’s opener, “American Dream Plan B,” after a volley of distorto-riffs and singing in that patented whine pitched between Roger McGuinn and Mr. Rogers. Will he be your neighbor? Will he let you be his? He won’t back down. “My success is anybody’s guess,” he’ll brag to anyone in earshot.
Hypnotic Eye is Petty’s 13th studio album with the Heartbreakers, a prototypical clutch of reactionary attitudes emboldened or sweetened or if we’re lucky mitigated by Mike Campbell’s inexhaustible supply of riffs and Petty’s devotion to the chorus. Even in his salad years not much save platinum sales separated the petulant Hard Promises from the anything-goes Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough). But Ryan Ulyate’s mix, the aural equivalent of Pinesol-scrubbed tiles, does flatter the players here, especially Benmont Tench’s quiet Mellotron and Campbell’s muted supper club licks on “Full Grown Boy.” Those ungrateful kids spending dough on Jack White and Kings of Leon haven’t heard “All You Can Carry,” a manifesto with an indelible take on the “Day Tripper” lead with the laughable maxim “Take what you can and leave the past behind.” Leave the past behind. Tom Petty!
Well, do as I say, etc. Every song on Hypnotic Eye is a seminar on formalism, with the sharp hard lines and utility of hotel furniture. It’s kind of not bad and often very good. If A Bigger Bang preserved the Rolling Stones as masters of a behind-the-beat rhythm that allowed their lead singer the freedom to rummage through as many kinds of priapic dynamism as his imagination allowed, Hypnotic Eye cements Petty as a leader whose band provides the tonal variants wanting in his singing and tunes. As a band, the Heartbreakers sound great. “Faultlines,” the best song Petty’s turned in since 1991, begins as a variant on the tight, tense groove of Ray Charles’ “What I’d Say,” until Campbell, Petty, and utility man Scott Thurston on harmonica pile the fuzzed arpeggios and curlicues. The attention to the plate tectonics of melodic and rhythmic embellishment matches the title conceit — form meets content, like we used to say in the old days.
Never mind what Petty says. He’s an old-days guy. “Even my best friends are turnin’ into crooks,” he croaks in “Burnt Out Town.” Hypnotic Eye won’t challenge the supremacy of the “angel whores” whom he bitched about in 2002’s The Last DJ; it won’t get airplay unless satellite radio comes calling. That’s cool, though. Whether defending his turf or just bitching, he prefers makin’ some noise to delineating anything that the we-want-maturity crowd would call adult, thank goodness; the promise of eternal boyish rocking helped him score chart and MTV hits years after Springsteen, Seger, and Mellencamp coasted with comps. Now he’s just another touring member of the pantheon. No myths to sell, just the idea of a working rock band reclaiming what’s left of a center-right boomer rock coalition. Hynoptic Eye gets my vote.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Hypnotic Eye
Reprise/Warner Bros.
By JON DOLAN
July 29, 2014
When Tom Petty emerged in the mid-Seventies, he was the perfect down-to-earth rock star for the times: a hungry Southern boy playing tight rock & roll in mellow Southern California, kicking against the era’s soft-bellied complacency with hard-jangling realness. On Hypnotic Eye, the 63-year-old and his eternal Heartbreakers return to the scrappy heat of those early days with their toughest, most straight-up rocking record in many years, deepened by veteran perspective. “I feel like a four letter word,” Petty sings on “Forgotten Man,” which sounds like “American Girl” remade as a Bo Diddley roof-rumbler. You can be sure as shit that four letter word isn’t “darn” or “rats”
Hypnotic Eye took three years to make, but it often sounds like buddies out on a weekend garage-jam bender. It’s especially reminiscent of their first two records, 1976’s Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and 1978’s You’re Gonna Get It!, before they hit on the crystal- line polish of 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes. It’s also of a piece with the foundational vibe of 2008’s Mudcrutch, where Petty convened the country-rock band he and two future Heartbreakers (guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench) played in Florida in the early Seventies before they hit L.A.
Yet there are few, if any, attempts to reenact Petty’s vintage hits. This is the Heartbreakers four decades and a million shows later, deepening their attack with sturdy reliability. On “Faultlines,” Petty and Campbell exchange snarling guitar phrases against a swamp-boogie swing from drummer Steve Ferrone and bassist Ron Blair. On “Red River,” the band’s trademark Byrdsy shimmer comes with extra crunch and desert horizon beauty. Sometimes the intensity doesn’t even need to be loud, as with the subdued “Full Grown Boy,” where Tench plays jazz-shaded piano and Petty pushes his voice into a relaxed croon for the wee small hours.
Petty populates these urgent songs with a cast of desperate dreamers, zealots, doomed lovers, loose cannons and alienated zombies like the woman in “Red River” stockpiling powerless religious talismans, the doomsaying town crier in the highway rocker “All You Can Carry,” or Petty himself in the forebodingly caustic “Shadow People,” wondering what role he can play “in my time of need, in my time of grief.”
The most sympathetic of these characters is the defiant freefaller in “American Dream Plan B,” clinging to hope against all evidence. “My success is anybody’s guess/But like a fool I’m betting on happiness,” Petty sings over acrid blasts of distortion. You can imagine the guy hearing this song on his car radio and using it to steel himself for life’s next knee in the grapes. When the God touched chorus kicks in, full of Petty’s ringing chords and Campbell’s psychedelic fuzz, it’s like a backslap of brotherly reassurance. If a Katy Perry song had come on the radio, he might’ve swerved into oncoming traffic. But not today. Tom Petty has saved drive time once again, just like he’s been doing since he was a cranky young man himself.
Tracklist:
01 – American Dream Plan B
02 – Fault Lines
03 – Red River
04 – Full Grown Boy
05 – All You Can Carry
06 – Power Drunk
07 – Forgotten Man
08 – Sins Of My Youth
09 – U Get Me High
10 – Burnt Out Town
11 – Shadow People
12 – Playing Dumb