Music from the Hawkwind family tree

Music from the Hawkwind family tree - Part 14

Thanks to Graham for these reviews

Worth A Listen: Spiral Realms – Crystal Jungles of Eos

This is Simon House’s second album under the “Spiral Realms” banner, released in 1995. He wrote all the material and plays most of it, accompanied by Len Del Rio. The album starts promisingly enough with one of his excellent effects-laden (i.e. spacey) violin pieces and it ends well with a couple of stately, slow tunes, also dominated by the violin. In between though, the keyboards and synth-led tracks are generally nondescript and veer dangerously close to supermarket and elevator music territory.

“Cysergy” kicks things off impressively and “Rush Hour Betelgeuse 5”

maintains the ambient space rock mood, if slackening off the intensity slightly. From here though, things go downhill. “View From Ganymede” drops the pace a bit further. Repetitive synth sequences and over-sweet melody lines dominate the sound and the push the feel a bit too far towards muzak for my tastes.

“Sands of Mars” is even more laid back, with gentle washes of synth and ethereal violin: the overall effect is soporific and it goes on way too long. “SF67” kicks off at the same funereal pace but the insistent synth-bass at least imparts a sense of urgency. There is some spacey violin, but fairly deep in the mix most of the time, along with plenty of sound effects. By the time the title track comes along, frankly it is all starting to sound the same. Familiar melody motifs, some synthetic percussion, a few sound effects, some slightly different textures on the synths, and very little sense of forward motion whatsoever. “Solar Wind” has some nice slow passages, but generally fails to lift the feeling of déjà vu hanging over the album.

“Parsecs” is better again, with a stately pace but a less cluttered mix, and a pleasantly melancholy melody on the violin. “Ice Raiders Of Charon” is another slow and tasteful tune and a good ending to a partially successful album. This was released on Cleopatra Hypnotic (CLEO9610-2) in 1995.

Approach with caution: Spiral Realms – Solar Wind

This is Spiral Realms in a live setting on the Turner Space Ritual tour of 1995, with the central axis of House and Del Rio augmented by Del Dettmar on wood axe. While some of the studio material actually works better in the live setting, the set sags badly mid-way through and never really recovers, finishing as it does with an appalling version of the Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive”

The opening “Cysergy” lacks the intensity of its studio counterpart (on “Crystal Jungles of Eos”) but the live sound is excellent, with the violin carrying the melody. The over-sweet cocktail of sounds that spoils some of

the studio recordings is happily avoided. “Lunar Sea” originally appeared on Turner’s “Prophets of Time” and maintains the mood nicely. “1000 Years Under Solar Sails” was one of the less successful tracks on “A Trip To G9” but it is atmospheric, if slow, in a live setting. “Tritium”, also from the first album, works well enough live, although this is a rather perfunctory reading.

“Solar Wind” lacked cohesion as a studio track and it drags here too; 8½ minutes seems to last 20 minutes! The following “Del Dettmar Improvisation” proves conclusively that Del should stick to his wood axe. At least, presumably it is his keyboard playing on the first half of this track; it is hard to imagine the other two players getting quite as lost in front of a keyboard.

“The Forge Of Vulcan” at least brings us back to familiar territory although, stretched out to almost 7 minutes, it overstays its welcome. The set closes with “Interstellar Overdrive”, an ill-advised cover version if ever there was one. Where the Floyd original is intense and dynamic this is utterly flaccid and really pointless. Imagine, take the original Floyd track, and strip off Syd Barrett’s guitar. Now take away the drums, and the bass. Play the opening riff a couple of times on keyboards, then add more synths and some violin and keep going for 9 minutes. It really, really, doesn’t work. Not quite as bad as Pinkwind doing Hendrix, but close.

This was released on Cleopatra Hypnotic (CLP 9764-2) in 1996.

Approach with caution: Third Ear Band – Music from Macbeth

Simon House did just one album with the Third Ear Band, the soundtrack to Polanski’s film of Macbeth, released in 1972. It was re-released on CD by BGO (BGO CD 61) in 1990.

Over some light acoustic percussion, the strings and wind instruments whine and squawk in what sounds like an extended tune-up session and it goes on. And on. Okay, I’d be the first to admit that “Orgone Accumulator” is not high art (whatever that is) but, mostly, these folk-jazz-avant garde-medieval noodlings are really not to my taste. As the backdrop to gothic images of doom and destruction (this is Macbeth, remember), I’m sure it’s great. To be fair, “Macbeth’s Return”, “At The Well”,

“Groom’s Dance” and “Bair Baiting” are not unpleasant tunes and “Fleance” is a decent folk ballad. Too much of the rest is just painful though. In any case, this album tells you little or nothing about Simon House’s musical development and certainly has nothing to do with Hawkwind.

Worth A Listen: Tubilah Dog – In Search of Plaice

(Review by Steve)

Dating from 1998, this CD bears a well-known name but the Hawkwind connections are probably limited to the historical. Once upon a time Jerry Richards had been a member of the band, but when this was made was on board the mothership. Nonetheless the Dogs were always within the overall ambit of psychedelic space rock, and had supplied a slim majority of the personnel in Hawkdog and the Agents of Chaos – bands in which Dave Brock spent much of 1988-89 playing the free festival circuit.

Watching (while the revolution dies) is surprisingly clean, featuring the clarity of a pulsing bass, occasional blasts of crunch guitar and poppy keyboards. The Irish sea shanty feeling is somewhat reminiscent of the Pogues on the chorus but the vocals sound like Jackie Leven of the much-maligned Doll By Doll.

Inside the Circle opens with some synthier moments: warm and resonant, but they have nothing to do with the main part of the track which is a mellow guitar-based piece, almost countryish though the vocals are more soulful than that. The songwriting thus far is very good, carving out distinctive numbers along very traditional lines. I almost want to draw a Van Morrison comparison here.

Wyrd Romance also opens with spacey synths, and then goes into grungier territory with a subterranean guitar / bass / drums workout, envelope-shifted lead guitar and layers of textural, spacey synth. This lopes along nicely, with that bass again propelling the song - it’s much more what I was expecting Tubilah Dog to be, knowing their background and the track they did on one of the Hawkwind, Friends & Relations albums. The coda is tense, anxious and sexual, culminating in an orgiastic blur of freakish guitar. Splendid!

Flowers In The Forest starts with some distant foreboding keyboards before pulling more of the celtic influences out of the hat. This sounds like some sort of duet of generically ethnic stringed instruments, with a nice undertone of menacing fuzzed guitar to stop it from becoming too safe and cosy.

Flat, Broke and Busted is yet another rootsy piece, with most of the ballast coming from acoustic guitars, though there is again a sustained droning lead instrument which I can’t identify (but it says here “Northumbrian pipes”…). The folksy vocals suit this kind of arrangement perfectly, which never goes into any kind of cliché because the individual tonality of the instruments and their placement in the mix is not normal. Right at the end the acoustic guitars invoke echoes of ‘You Know You’re Only Dreaming’, and given the title of this album, perhaps ISOS was an influence. If so it’s mostly well disguised!

Friends, with its understated vocals, prefigures the sort of thing Coldplay have been doing for the last couple of years. But another unusual arrangement stops that comparison dead in its tracks: a throbbing bass pedal is offset against distorted guitars low in the mix, alternated with reverberating crystalline keyboard arpeggios. The vocals again get quite soulful on the chorus, and some “orchestral hit” type samples punctuate all this quite effectively. I’ve made it sound like a dog’s dinner but really, it works very well and is utterly original without being at all strange!

Domitius – more dark, sweeping synth chords and some quavering mad lead guitar (?) make for a drawn-out, unsettling intro. A sepulchral bell and widely-spaced bass drum beats insinuate themselves into proceedings…then the vocals come in, suggestive of a Gregorian chant, as an entire layer of synth is withdrawn at the exact same moment. Rather an odd transition, that. And it gets odder, with some dark, grinding guitar welling up at about five and a half minutes…almost a Sabbath-type riff, where the timing is off-kilter, giving the whole thing a psych / prog / gothic vibe.

O.W.V. is the last track, and initially the most Hawkwind-ish with a wash of keyboard over a tentative, pulsing rhythm. But then some oddly-shaped squawking guitar chords and menacing semi-whispered vocals reassert the originality of this whole album. The bridge and chorus vocals are almost proggish and this makes me think of the Cardiacs (not a band I know very well) in terms of intent rather than sound, perhaps.

Overall, a very interesting album. There’s a definite progression from the traditional moves in the opening tracks to a darker, twisted theme. It never totally rocks out, but isn’t that kind of album anyway. I suspect this one’s a grower.