In the early months of 1994, British band Bark Pscyhosis released their seminal debut album Hex.
Shortly after, music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote a piece reviewing the album, musing on its almost scientific experimentation. This review includes the first recorded instance of the term “post rock.”
It’s true that this record bears little resemblance to the guitar-heavy, cinematic, climax chasing music that is often described with that term today (that lineage can be traced back to Mogwai’s 1997 debut Young Team). Likewise, this isn’t the first record to bear these aesthetic markers—Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock had similar musings with ambience and jazz in 1991. Even Spirit of Eden flirted with those same ideas in 1988. Then there’s Brian Eno, who abandoned rock and roll for ambient music in the 1970s.
But none of that diminishes the beauty of Hex. Even by today’s standards, it is unconventionally gorgeous—ambient washes of piano lines, guitar reverb, and horns dance with angular, jazzy drum patterns and bouncing bass lines. Much of this seems to have influenced Slowdive’s Pygmalion, Tortoise’s TNT or Low’s Double Negative—all absolute classics (even if Double Negative isn’t quite yet two years old).
Despite being a highly influential album, Hex doesn’t seem to present itself with any sort of grand statements (neither does it have a reputation befitting its legacy, as I’ve just recently even heard of it). It’s a beautifully understated record, rarely raising its voice.
“Loom” opens the record with a somber, subdued piano line. As it repeats, it is joined by jingling percussion, atmospheric guitars, and jazzy, ghost-noted drum beats. Graham Sutton’s voice lightly in the atmosphere, vaporlike and waifish. It fades into “A Street Scene,” which is practically a dance track in comparison with its acrobatic bass part and horn blasts. “Absent Friend” is maybe the songiest track here, featuring identifiable verses and choruses as melodicas and high-fretted, effected guitars dance in the higher register. “Absent Friend” is especially conventional when juxtaposed against “Big Shot,” which is the most Double Negative track, featuring the most straightforward drumbeat on the record against sparse, ambient chord changes.
“Fingerspit” pares back even further, but it is somehow the noisiest track on the disk. Sutton’s voice is accompanied almost solely by a single guitar, a drum tap buried in the mix. But at certain times across the eight minute run time, the delicate strums turn angry, skronking with distortion and scraping strings.
Closer “Pendulum Man” is really where it starts to resemble what we call post rock today. It runs for nine and a half wordless minutes, alternating between an unchanging bass arpeggio and passages of swelled chords. Pianos, horns, and guitars punctuate the atmosphere, but a melody never quite develops. Instead, it spends its time showcasing the atmospheres that have encapsulated the rest of the songs.
And once again, I must reiterate how shocked I am that I had never even heard of this band until a few months ago. As long as I have been a serious music fan, I have spent countless hours pouring over lists and reviews of the best and greatest artists in different genres. And yet somehow, Hex slid through the cracks, avoiding attention between talks of Laughing Stock and Young Team and Spiderland and countless other highly influential post rock records. But now that I’ve corrected that, I’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for.