The new studio album will be out in March 2005 (we are told...) Here's the cover (thx Phil!) and the tracklist
So this new album ("Take Me To Your Leader") has been keenly anticipated for a long time, and it is finally going to get a release in March 2005, with the cover artwork shown above, by Pete Pracownik. A single will also be released at around the same time (23/8/04, apparently): a new version of Spirit Of The Age b/w Angela Android, with vocals by Matthew Wright and Richard Chadwick respectively. In addition to Matthew Wright, other guests appearing on the album are Arthur Brown, Lene Lovich and Lemmy.
The tracklist for the new album (updated 11/09/05) is:
Spirit Of The Age
Out Here We Are
Greenback Massacre
To Love A Machine
Take Me To Your Leader
Digital Nation
Sunray
Sighs
Angela Android
A Letter To Robert
And I will put a review of it here, of course, but this is a long way off yet!
Well, the release of the new album is now imminent, and what a wait it’s been. Depending on whether you count 1997’s “Distant Horizons” or 1998’s half-live “In Your Area” as the last Hawkwind studio album, it’s been 7 or 8 years since the last time we had a new Hawkwind album that wasn’t a live recording. During that time the album has gone through a total re-recording: according to Dave Brock, the band had to spend 3 years “learning how to use the computer” on account of being “barbarians” when it comes to technology!
There has also been a name change for the album as a whole (from ‘Destruction Of The Death Generator’ to ‘Take Me To Your Leader’) and some alterations in the tracklist too: the listing shown above is the actual / final track listing, but back in 2003, Angela Android was intended to appear on the Spirit Of The Age single only, and not on the album. Other titles that had been bandied around at this time were Technoland (used instead on the Christmas 2002 free CD single), Land Of Dreams, Sparkles & Slide, Population Overload (this got renamed to “The Reality Of Poverty”), The Molecular Family, Asylum Island, One World Future and Trip (a tape of Bob Calvert's vocals, set to the musical elements of Ode To A Timeflower; this featured on the set lists of the Spring 2004 tour dates). All these in fact came from a story that appeared in the May 2003 issue of Classic Rock magazine, which also erroneously asserted that Hawkwind were about to sign to SPV Records: so their non-appearance should perhaps come as no surprise.
Even so, as recently as Spring 2004 (in the tour programme dating from then) the album’s track listing was given as:
1. Spirit Of The Age
2. Take Me To Your Leader
3. Digital Nation
4. Out Here We Are
5. Sunray
6. String Theory
7. The Reality Of Poverty
8. Cyber Space
9. Letter To Robert
10. Silver Machine
The lyrics to “The Reality Of Poverty” were even extensively featured in the tour programme, but this track has since vanished from view. Others in this listing that have not been heard of since are String Theory and Cyber Space. In fact, by early October 2004, the tracklist, as defined by the samples that were made available on Mission Control, had changed again to be close to the final version:
1. Angela Android
2. Digital Nation
3. Greenback Massacre
4. Letter To Robert
5. Out Here We Are
6. Reality of Poverty
7. Spirit of the Age
8. Sunray
9. Take Me To Your Leader
10. To Love A Machine
Angela Android was back in, while String Theory, Cyber Space and Silver Machine had vanished, the former two seemingly for good. But the same can’t be said for Silver Machine, which, despite seeming to have dropped off the album, made an unexpected appearance on TotalRock radio on 11th March 2005 as part of a tribute to veteran hard rock DJ Tommy Vance, who’d died five days earlier. Lasting 7 minutes, the new version was topped and tailed by a dedication from Dave Brock, and came across as a very faithful rendition of the original, but sounding cleaned-up and benefitting from more modern instrument voicings: Lemmy's vocals sounded very musical (quite unlike his latterday growl), the guitar sound was hard and bright, but followed much of the original version's lead stylings, and the synth background had far more clarity than the whooshing roar of Dik'n'Del 72, but still generated that feeling of excitement. The song also featured an ambient mid-section and an unusual coda, featuring a dancey drum pattern and a Dobro-sounding guitar. Overall, the best version of Silver Machine I've heard, packed with urgency and power. But not on the album…
Well this has now been out in the wider world for ten days, and while I’d like to tell you that I am a special person who got an advance copy several weeks ago, this would not be at all true. I ordered from Amazon, just like everybody else, and I suspect I might be one of the *last* people in the world to have had it delivered to them, so special am I!
So it is already generally known that there is a blotch on the front cover (the illustration on this page is from an earlier proof and doesn’t have the blotch) and that the CD comes with a nice booklet, 16 pages in colour, which includes a few song lyrics, detailed credits, some illustrations and a number of photos taken by various people. There have also been a number of reviews posted to the Yahoo! Group and the BOC-L/Hawkwind email lists which I have tried not to allow to colour my reactions to the album, but anyway, here we go…
The album opens with a full-length version of what was just released in ‘Radio Edit’ form as one version of the Spirit Of The Age single. That sounds a terribly convoluted way in which to describe it, and well, it is a bit convoluted. Fading in the familiar 2-chord riff, this observes the contemporary update of the original cut’s sound and arrangement (-see my review of the Radio Edit on the CD singles page) and opens with a brief guitar solo before Matthew Wright intones the lyrics to the first verse only. He does it excellently, invoking Calvert’s vocal style every bit as successfully as Ron Tree did before him. Then there’s a chorus and some more lead guitar.
Starting with “I am a clone, I am not alone”, Dave Brock then takes over the lead vocals, and sings rather than speaks them, chasing this with another chorus and scads more lead guitar. There are some excellent keyboard noises in the outro, some of which are traditional Hawkwind synth tones, and some figures that I take to be organ. These must surely be the work of James Clemas who is so credited in the accompanying CD booklet – they are superb little musical touches which really enhance the overall vibe and I wish were afforded greater prominence in the body of the song...
Out Here We Are is a song of three movements, with the opening passage being a slow, majestic affair of celestial keyboards and earth-shifting bass pedals, the epitome of the best elements of post-1990 Hawkwind (think ‘Blue Shift’). After two minutes this moves into a lighter passage of open-sounding arpeggios that might possibly be played on the upper strings of Alan Davey’s bass, overlaid with cool jazz sax / trumpet / flute from Jez Huggett: completely atypical. The final two minutes are a return to the opening piece, and pull the song back into familiar Hawkwind territory. A mellow triumph!
Greenback Massacre - this one is an Alan Davey number and, as others have pointed out, could function very well as a Bedouin song. The main riff is quite awkward, seeming to have one bass note too many (I think this is in 9/8 time!) and it is the bass which totally drives this song. Alan’s raspy vocals of course take the lead, and for my money it’s on the chorus where they and his pummelling bass work really make this powerhouse of a song a contender for standout track on the album. The guitar, while subdued on this arrangement, does a lot of Eastern-scale lead, subtly reinforcing the Bedouinness of it all – hard rock with Arabic influences. Does what it says on the tin.
On every Hawkwind album there has to be at least one classic Brock track, and even the weakest in the canon do not disappoint: Distant Horizons had ‘Waimea Canyon Drive’, and this album has To Love A Machine, a much stronger song. Lyrically this is the flipside to Angela Android, exploring the interaction of a human woman with a male android, and taking a bleaker view. Musically there is some very good acoustic guitar topping and tailing the vocal section of the song, which has another cool jazzy outro, this time featuring the cocktail lounge piano heroics of Jason Stuart!
Take Me To Your Leader is Hawkwind in trance mode, and for once they do the e-throb kind of thing in a way that stands up to any scrutiny. Pulsing bass notes, busy skittering beats, twinkling synths and a dirty, surging guitar combine to set up a brilliant instrumental opening lasting a couple of minutes. After that the song moves into a vocal section, with a Brock spoken interlude and sung vocals by Richard Chadwick. Who continues with the lead voice on Digital Nation: which is another departure for Hawkwind in songwriting terms, being a tightly-arranged ballad (written by Richard) that maintains the brilliant production work of the album as a whole. The only thing I can think of that it resembles is some of the stuff Richard did with Jerry Richards on the Star Nation album in 2002.
Arthur Brown pops up for the first time here with Sunray, touted by several people as a better choice than Spirit of The Age for a new single, and it has some of the same melodic thrust as ‘Right To Decide’, without sacrificing the underlying muscular swagger that is an essential part of Hawkwind. Arthur’s vocals are characteristically excellent – although the musical material is nothing like this, he actually has a great voice for what used to be called Blue-eyed Soul. For example his ‘yeah!’s in the sexy little coda, that kicks in at around the three minute mark, intertwine surperbly with the revving organ chords – before a distorted guitar with varispeed tremolo ushers this one out the door, too soon if anything.
Sighs may be the least familiar track name on the album, and it is in fact just a brief synthy piece that includes the spoken lyric from ‘Technoland’. It leads straight into Angela Android, which is different from the live version that was recorded on 25/5/2003 and released on the SotA single: this is a studio recording. In the accompanying DVD (of which more in a moment) and also in a recent interview with Scott Heller that appeared in Aural Innovations, Richard Chadwick gave a very cogent explanation of the subject matter which I thought was at odds with the slightly smutty lyrical content – and in fact the lyrics are fairly pathetic compared with the interesting concept that Richard enunciates as being the theme. Lene Lovich, who supplies vocals, plainly doesn’t mind, and conveys the essential lightheartedness of the track with some trademark squeals and trills. Musically it’s a number that has improved since its first appearance in the 2003 Spring Tour set lists, although is still very monotonal with not much in the way of chordal variation at all. Simon House is credited with keyboards here (and violin on Sunray) but I must admit I would not have noticed had this not been mentioned in the CD booklet.
Finally, the album finishes with A Letter To Robert, which consists of an improvised spoken delivery by Arthur Brown, narrating an imaginary conversation with Robert Calvert, over a backing of seemingly formless thumps, whirrs and bleeps. These however make more actual sense than Arthur’s stream of consciousness, which runs the gamut from nepotism to alien spaceships landing on golf courses, via paranoia, misogyny, adulterated food, environmental destruction, EastEnders, etc.. I suppose someone somewhere may like this, but for me it’s a waste of time and a weak way to close the album out. Very disappointing, especially when you know that other tracks were bumped off the album to make room for this!
So, where does this stand in the overall scale of Hawkwind’s work? I must admit I wasn’t expecting much, and Take Me To Your Leader more than delivers: the sound of the album is amazing, being full and powerful, but retaining absolute clarity. It is without doubt the best-produced album they have ever made. And the material is (with the exception of A Letter To Robert) also much better than expected – not that the new stuff ranks with the numbers to be found on Hall Of The Mountain Grill, but still… Perhaps the main disappointment in this regard is the presence of a twenty-eight year old song – but at least the album, unlike the single(s) does not rely on a preponderance of resurrected elderly numbers to maintain Hawkwind’s presence into the 21st century.
The most I had hoped for as far as the new album was concerned was that it would be better than stuff like Distant Horizons and In Your Area and would ideally stand up alongside the stronger albums that Hawkwind have recorded in the latter part of their career, like Electric Tepee and Alien 4. There is no doubt that this has been achieved, and in certain respects maybe TMTYL surpasses those albums: it cetainly has a greater consistency of material, whereas Alien 4 and Electric Tepee featured a handful of great tracks alongside some filler. Time will tell exactly where TMTYL stands, but for right now it’s a definite thumbs up….hope we don’t have to wait 8 years for the follow-up!
The first 2,000 copies of this album are accompanied by a free DVD which features interviews with Dave Brock, Alan Davey and Richard Chadwick, and a disparate clutch of music tracks. The interviews are none too challenging, lasting about ten minutes each and being made up of fairly soft deliveries from the interviewer (a young woman called Sam Boyero) - this is, after all, more of a promotional tool than a piece of investigative journalism. Dave refuses to play along, though, by declining to characterise the new album in terms of enthusiastic hyperbole - the best he can bring himself to say about it is "it's all right". (Trust me, it's better than all right!) Richard, when asked the same question, gives a rather more thoughtful answer by replying that it takes him about a year after release to be able to decide objectively how much he likes a particular Hawkwind song or album. And these two answers pretty much sum up the differing responses of these two interviewees.
Alan is another kettle of fish. He comes across as a more emotive person and touchingly confesses that he struggles with reading (dyslexia, one assumes) and hence with writing lyrics, not that this has stopped him. Of the trio, he is I would guess the most committed to and obsessed by the music of Hawkwind, and is certainly the most driven character in the band. His interview segment closes out with his comment that not everyone who's been in the band has been easy to get along with...ironic, really, as the paperback edition of Carol Clerk's 'The Saga Of Hawkwind' is expected to reveal when published in January 2006!
The music tracks are (in this order) the Spirit Of The Age promotional video; the July 2004 Rusirock festival performance of Silver Machine with Lemmy and Phil Caivano guesting; a 1992 concert clip from the Brixton Academy, with the studio recording of 'Right To Decide' overlaying it (I recognise this one from when I was reviewing VHS videos for the Pre-DVD: Hawkwind Video's of the 90's page); and 2 camcorder takes from dates on the 2004 UK tour, showing Spirit Of The Age and Psychedelic Warlords respectively. The two lattermost of these tracks have a text banner apologising for the inferior sound quality reproduction superimposed on the footage, though not *too* obtrusively. That's not really necessary, but what a shame that the camera angle and zoom never alter throughout these two clips, making it seem as though the camcorder wielder just stood at the back of the hall, pressed the record button and then took care to remain utterly immobile for the next 90 minutes. A missed opportunity, there.
The Ruisrock footage is pretty decent, and portrays the band plus their illustrious guests pummelling and blasting their way through their one and only true hit, to the evident enjoyment of the crowd. It's quite a contrast to the Spirit Of The Age promotional video, which prominently features Matthew Wright along with a reasonable dash of fairly low-budget video effects of vials, flagons, pipettes, atoms, galaxies, stars, etc. overlaying incongruous close-ups of the band and their favourite minor TV personality. But it's all good clean fun, and given the price of admission, it's very nice to have!
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