HW: Love in Space?

[Douglas Pearson]

Christian wrote:

>At 14:44 11.12.97 -0500, Steve Swann wrote:
>>I remember quite a bit of discussion about the _Love in Space_ double
>>live album over the past few months.  Unfortunately, I was just
>>skim-reading the list at the time, and I never really got a sense of
>>what kind album it is.  What's the music like?  Is this Hawkwind
>>rocking, or being ambient?

Ron Tree is on it, so it's certainly energetic/rocking in parts, but there
are also lots of ambient bits - sometimes within the same song (the
"...Palestine" intro to "Hassan i Sahba" comes to mind).  The only "new"
thing on it, besides a couple of the ambient song links, is the title
track, which, being a "love" song, is kind of uncharacteristic for Hawkwind
(is "Zarozinia" the only other HW song that would fit this category?).
Maybe yr cuppa tea, maybe not ...

>Sort a being... eh... blah..... SORTA ROCKING AMBIENT... maybe...
>just really really ho-hum..... IMO. The least essential HW since...
>er, White Zone... no wait, Undisclosed Files... snzzzzzzz... zzzzz...
>zzz..zzzzzzzz... huh!?? What's that? I fell asleep for 2 hours!
>Oh my, someone must have slipped LiS into the CD player!!!!

Well, I think it's a better (live) album than 'The Business Trip' - it
rocks more than that one!  On both live albums, I think the band was
relying too much on the pre-sequenced backing that they've seemed to move
away from a bit recently (having a fourth member now helps). One thing I
liked about the US shows this summer is that the band were able to
seamlessly move between musical segments that had alot of MIDI/sequenced
backing and those that were completely raw and unadorned.  If there was a
live album of the Strange Daze set, I'm sure I'd like it much more than
either tBT or LiS.

>>I also got the impression that some people prefered the versions of
>>the songs on there to the versions on _Alien_.  Yes/no?

>If you have Alien, it depends what you think..... I thought A4 was pretty
>er, twee(?), and LiS is a live album with mostly the same songs, really
just
>a boooooooooring retread IMO... I mean, most of the stuff live is just the
>same
>old preprogrammed sounds, canned playing all the way, or at least so
routine
>its just devoid of anything NEW. Maybe a little fuzzier.

Yeah, the live versions are better than the studio ("Blue Skin" especially,
IMO), but if you don't like the A4 album anyway, then you're probably not
gonna like the LiS versions either.  I think they do a real good job with
the oldies on LiS, though.  "Robot" was a major set highlight when they
played it in the US on Ron's first tour, and I probably like the version of
"Hassan i Sahba" (once they get down to rocking out) better than on
'California Brainstorm' ... plus it has the first version of "Silver
Machine" (and a good one!) since that single on Samurai (which was as bad a
version as the one on 'Choose Your Masques' IMO).

>Nice *looking* package
>though. IF THEY'D SLASHED IT DOWN TO 1 DISC IT WOULD HAVE BEEN >TWICE AS
GOOD!

Agreed.  They could've kept the "oldies" and just a few choice A4 cuts ...

        -Doug
         ceres at sirius.com