Pop Music Reviews : Hypnotics at Bogart’s: You Are Getting Sleepy . . .

All current hard-rock bands draw on an extremely limited set of influences, from the Yardbirds to Aerosmith and back again. Good bands synthesize a sound that while evocative of the prototypes is uniquely their own. Bad bands just cop the riffs. And since bad bands seem to sell more records these days than good bands, a lot of good bands--Guns N’ Roses, for example--hide behind bad-band facades.

At Bogart’s on Monday, Londoners Thee Hypnotics seemed to be that anomaly, a bad band in good-band’s clothing. The guitarist had a tendency toward greasy Hendrixismo, the band whipped its hair around in new and unusual ways, and its best song, “Justice in Freedom,” sounded like some awesome undiscovered Iggy thing. If the show had been a tape of something 20 years old, you could have discovered the stone roots of the Seattle Sound, the fuzzed-out stuff played now by such groups as Mudhoney and Soundgarden.

But in the end, Thee Hypnotics were humorless, as slavish in re-creating the early ‘70s Stooges-MC5 Detroit groove as Whitesnake ever was in aping Led Zep, and the audience remained all but catatonic.