After two intermittently enjoyable albums rehashing the sounds of Detroit Rock City, one would hope Massa Hypnos would find Awesome Color accomplishing one of two things: either kicking out jams that sound less like mimcry or mastering the moves they've copped and produce a high-quality Stooges/Nugent knock-off. When album opener "Transparent" starts, with a need for speed that trades paint with Deep Purple's "Highway Star", it seems like Massa Hypnos is just going to be business as usual. If only.
Nipping on the heels of "Transparent" is "Flying", which proves Awesome Color are equally adept at dispassionately ripping off indie rock. With its effect-free, strummy guitars and singer/guitarist Derek Stanton doing his best Thurston Moore imitation, the group comes up with a Dirty-era outtake even Sonic Youth completists could live without. It's a half-hearted attempt to diversify Awesome Color's already derivative portfolio, and it's sadly not the last on the album.
It's a shame, too, because when Awesome Color is cookin', and you can forgive their lyrical sins (and your copies of Raw Power and Paranoid aren't handy), they're a decent sludge-loving rock band. If that seems like too many hoops to jump through, you're right, but hear me out. "Oaxaca" finds the group working an insidious shuffling groove to great effect. It not only acts as the perfect backdrop for a fuzzy psych'd-out guitar solo that fills the song's final third, but it also distracts from the tune's corny lyric about escaping New York City because "Everyone's in a hurry/ And the noise is getting old." Unfortunately, "Vision" is the only other tune on Hypnos that recalls the "classic" Awesome Color sound, and for every track on the album that highlights Awesome Color's limited strengths, there are plenty illustrating how limited those strengths actually are.
The most egregious is "Zombie", which finds Awesome Color all but asking for Alice Cooper to sue them. Then again, I'm not sure Cooper would want to have anything to do with this "I'm Eighteen" knock-off's woe-is-society metaphor. The less said about a shaggy blues groaner like "Slaughterhouse" (or, as Stanton sings it, "slaaawter hawwwwss"), the better. And as a reward for making it all the way through the album, there's the played-out freakout at the ass end of "IOU". The album's eight tracks total only 36 minutes, but Massa Hypnos seems twice as long, and wears out its welcome in a fraction of that time. Back in 2006, writing about their eponymous debut, Marc Masters suggested that "it would be unfair to say Awesome Color won't eventually grow into something more unique." Four years and two albums later, Awesome Color find themselves burning through reams of tracing paper, waiting for a growth spurt that might never come.
