HW: album slagging

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 09:23:19PM -0500, Mike Montfort typed out:
> Deborah Vacano wrote:
> >Okay.. In my humble opinion...
> >I really think most every Hawkwind album rocks..
> >Some more then other but ..

	<snip the ritual>

> >Remember?
> >This is why we listen to Hawkwind..

	To be honest I think this is the kind of party where what you 
get out of it depends on what you bring. But whether or not the various 
almost-completely-different incarnations of this thing we call Hawkwind 
somehow contain an identifiable magick, I think one thing is for sure, 
which is that it's not done consciously. I think there is a certain 
thing that is `like Hawkwind', but I also think several HW albums don't 
really agree with that, most notably ASAM, also _Spacebrock_ obviously. 
I don't think Baron Brock and crew are laying the stuff down, listening 
to it with that glass of wine and going, "no, it just hasn't got that 
thing, let's retrack it". So I think this has to be the ear of the 
listener. And there are definitely things which give me that buzz more 
effectively than, say, _Out and Intake_.

> EVERY Hawkind album is better than any other so called Space Rock band, 
> and most other bands too.    I've tried to listen to them all, some of 
> which I really like.  But they can't hold a candle to hawkwind.

	I'm not even sure if you could call ASAM space-rock. Certainly 
stand it next to Litmus's _You Are Here_ or other such threats to the 
throne and it doesn't look like the spacerockier of the two. I'm not 
saying it's not a better album--I suppose even for me, in the end it is, 
in fact--just not the better space-rock album. I don't think TMTYL is 
even `space-rock' by the kind of definition that starts from _Space 
Ritual_. Yet these are all supposed to be the same `thing' somehow. Not 
to my ears... Most of them are good things, as they go, but they don't 
compare to each other half as readily as they compare to other bands 
doing things similar to what Hawkwind were doing at that moment. Yours,
									
Jon

-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk