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Feb 23, 2024 By Mark Lager

Released on Valentine’s Day in 1994, Bark Psychosis’ Hex is an aptly named album as it casts a spellbinding hypnosis on the listener. Hex could be considered ahead of its time but more accurately it still sounds lost out of time. It followed in the footsteps of Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and The Verve’s A Storm in Heaven and is one of the most experimental records of the 1990s. Hex is a melancholy and wintry song cycle, deeply textured and cinematic, for those lonely moments in the middle of the night.

Hex opens with plangent piano and hovering strings, a cosmic waiting, the sound of snow falling, in “The Loom.” There’s a late night noirish neon glow in “A Street Scene” and “Big Shot,” embellished with narcotic, chilled vibraphones. “Eyes & Smiles” is a stunning climax of icy guitar and glistening brass section where the anguished, moody vocals and lyrics climb to an evocative and haunting peak as Graham Sutton repeats, “One step further back…and you gotta go home!”

It appears the album is over.

In a strikingly subtle way, Hex saves its definitive moment for last. “Pendulum Man” is a quintessential winter track—ethereal and meditative. It is a nearly 10-minute long instrumental of trance-inducing vastness. The guitar’s metronomic tone resembles a pendulum swinging, the clock ticking, the minutes and hours of the overcast day gliding and passing away in time lapse. Around the 4-minute mark, there is a breakthrough in the drifting clouds—silver blue glow surrounds as lush organ and electronics seep into the soundscape. A stark and echoing guitar cascades ever so slowly while the piano from the beginning returns for a faltering end, sad and sighing notes. The organ drone fades into the distance.

www.firerecords.com/artists/bark-psychosis/

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