Kiss to the Brain is the closest Helios Creed has ever come to conventional hard rock. Whereas the last Helios Creed album, Lactating Purple, was essentially a long psychedelic track extended over an album length, Kiss to the Brain has a more song-oriented approach. There is no shortage of psychedelic dementia (like the title track and the opener, “XL-351″) but there is also plenty of concise, hard-driving guitar rock, such as “Throw Away the Rind” and “Legs.” Even the spacy psychedelic songs are enveloped in fairly conventional structures. This is still not anywhere near mainstream hard rock — there’s plenty of bizarre lyrics and spacy sound effects, even on the hard rock songs — but it does display that Helios Creed has the ability to create more than unstructured sonic explorations. The result is the most satisfying effort of Helios Creed’s oeuvre. – Victor W. Valdivia