Way back in the day about ten years ago, we were playing drums on a coast-to-coast tour of the United States with an indie psych trio based in Eugene, OR. During our near two months of travel, bandmates inundated us with a handful of artists and genres we hadn’t spent a lot of time listening to. For whatever reason The Flaming Lips really stuck with us. They were intimate and subtle, but also grand and theatric.
We ourselves even tried to visit their artistic headquarters during a day off in Oklahoma City, but were denied entry, so we ate expensive Mexican food across the street instead. So… why the hell are we opening a review for New Jersey’s Hexagon Cat with memories of the road?
Because that’s really the last time we remember prog, pop, and songwriter leanings actually got under our skin without feeling like it was trying too hard. We love being impressed, but something coming from the heart is almost always better, even if that means it’s more obscure or harder to classify. Hexagon Cat has a dream-like quality to it – you can’t always tell if parts were recorded in a bedroom or expensive studio, but it also communicates in such an effusive, all-encompassing way that it doesn’t matter.
Quality and quantity aren’t problems on Red Hexagon, they’re just givens on a record that feels more like a sea of experience than your typical batch of tunes. There’s a pretty lush selection of styles and instrumentation, sometimes feeling like math rock with string parts, and others more like prog made for chill lo-fi fans. Whatever you call it, thanks to painstaking arrangement and production, it is exceptionally pretty.
On top of all of the above, there’s a palpable influence from vintage 70’s and 80’s prog like Pink Floyd, Wishbone Ash, and Electric Light Orchestra that give Hexagon Cat an almost romanticized Elliot Smith-like edge, which is pretty novel in these parts. If you’re looking for something easy on the ears but still invigorating on every level, Red Hexagon is a record with a lot to give.
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