What can you expect from a band (in this case a duo) that goes under the name of Hippy? Something very trippy? And does the album title Falling In Love with Being Alive also point in that direction?
Well, maybe the album opener “Consistently Inconsistent” wouldn’t exactly qualify as something quite trippy in the psychedelic sense of the term, but there’s something certainly in the music that Paul Hipson (singer/songwriter) and Hugh Frizell (guitars) from Glasgow Scotland that make a connection with the good side of hard psych turning into the hard rock era, at the end of the ’60s and the beginning of the ’70s.
Hippy has that guitar-slinging and hard vocal edge in their sound, but they never lose the sense of melody throughout the album to make it veer anywhere into too heavy or too ‘trippy’ sound.
Falling In Love with Being Alive turns out to be just good ole heavy psych/hard rock with its sound firmly grounded in the good melody (“Vicious Circle”) to qualify it as good ole rock music in a fully modern suit and sensitivity to exclude it from simply just being retro.
Actually, with Falling In Love with Being Alive Hippy show us how to be hip(py) in a classic rock sense without setting yourself too much in the past.