Eyes - Auto-Magic (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Sep 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website

This came to me labelled as melodic rock but Soldier of Love opens up the album as clear hard rock with thoughts about crossing that border into heavy metal. Its has a confident barrelling pace and it continues to shift wonderfully throughout its five minutes. Mysterious Ways is slower, moving to melodic rock, but the drums still have quite the punch to them; they're not fast but they're high in the mix. Until the End of Time has some glam to its opening, before it moves back to melodic rock and that's most of the variety we're going to find on this album. Or so I thought after one listen.

I should add that five minutes seems to be an important threshold for Eyes. Almost everything on this album runs between five and five and a half minutes, except Innocent Dreamer that runs ten seconds longer and Don't Stop the Night that's done in only four minutes and change. That's long for melodic rock, where songs tend to be those three golden minutes that radio stations would be happy to play before moving onto something else. These songs are all driven by melody and beat, most obviously through Peter Andersson's voice, but they stretch notably past that sweet spot for radio.

Soldier of Love is my highlight, but it's also the only overt hard rock song here in a sea of melodic rock with a prominent beat. The only other song that shifts like this one is What Money Can't Buy, with a nice slide riff. It's not as heavy, but it's growing on me fast. The guitars, courtesy of Joakim Sandberg, remind of a Deep Purple tone, possibly in part because the keyboards back it so closely. There's some Tank here at points too, though never quite that heavy. Like the opener, this would have played very well on the Friday Rock Show back in the mid-eighties.

I'm not sure who else is in the band, nowadays, because I can't find that information, but on their debut album in 2021, Perfect Vision 20/20, Andersson was the only member who wasn't formerly in Aces High. At least I think so. I'm seeing so many different details that often shuffle names around that I'm not sure who's who any more. Maybe this is Aces High, merely renamed to Eyes for some reason, like maybe they got mistaken for an Iron Maiden tribute band too often. If so, then Aces High released three albums that I'm aware of, going back to the nineties. Eyes have added two to that count.

Whoever's in the band and whatever its history, this album is capable stuff. Soldier of Love caught my attention immediately but nothing else followed suit, so I wondered if I should move on to find a different album to review. I stuck with it, though, and What Money Can't Buy enforced itself on a second listen. Then other songs started to make their presence known too and, the longer I listen, the more I like this album. Sure, I'd have liked it more if more songs had matched those two in use of power, but they're all growers and that's not a bad thing. The title track built next with its sassy riff and then the laid back Sailing Ships Across the Ocean with its tasty guitar solo. And so on.

Maybe one reason why it wasn't more immediate for me is because so much of it is fundamentally simple. Innocent Dreamer has a simple but effective riff. Any Way You Dream has an even simpler riff that's arguably even more effective. On a first listen, there was nothing I hadn't heard before. On a second or a third, they got under my skin because they're just performed so well. There's not a flash moment in their bones. Nobody's showing off. Nobody's stealing the spotlight, even in the guitar solos. That tends to mean that few moments leap out for special attention. I didn't end up with a lot of written notes after a first time through.

What gradually manifests is the realisation that these guys know precisely what they're doing and what they're doing is exactly what they need to be doing at any particular moment in time. All this eventually reminded me of comic book artists, like Will Eisner, who started out as cartoonists. They don't draw a lot of lines, which tends to makes their work seem simplistic, but they're experienced enough and skilled enough to draw exactly the right line in exactly the right place, so the resulting effect is huge. In music, Bad Company would be the epitome of that. All Bad Company have on this band is the fact that I know a lot of their stuff by heart. Eyes are still new on me.

And so I found myself listening again and again and again, each time playing better than the last. After a first listen, I was thinking about a 6/10. After a second, I realised that I should up that to a 7/10. After a third, there was no doubt. After half a dozen times through, I'm singing along with a song like Through the Night that hadn't grabbed me before and so I'm wondering about whether an 8/10 would be warranted. It's not all melodic rock now. It's neat tone in Auto-Magic. It's bounce in Through the Night. It's laid back elegance in Sailing Ships Across the Ocean. It's apparently the gift that keeps on giving. So, yeah, an 8/10 and a magnetic one because I don't want to move on.