HW Knights of Space

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 07:54:33AM -0500, Carl Edlund Anderson typed out:
> Purely out of curiosity, I now find myself wondering what you would  
> pick as their worst album and how many stand between it and TMTYL? :)

	Well, there's a question. I think their worst, for me, is 
unquestionably _Zones_, a hodge-podge of sub-par live material redeemed 
from scratched plastic monotony only by a few moments of tension, and 
studio offerings that should never have been committed to tape 
(`Dangerous Visions', I'm looking at you). I also don't reckon 
IitBotFtbD very much, I mean it's not bad but it's not exciting at all, 
to me at least. IYA has some excellent stuff on it but is marred by 
badly-edited Rizz and is perhaps the most schizophrenically-split of all 
HW albums, Dave on one side and a band on the other and when the twain 
meet it's got Rizz all over it (I was much happier with him on _Hawkwind 
1997_). _Out and Intake_ is like _Zones_ only without the extremes 
and with more anonymous production. And I like _Spacebrock_ for what it 
is, viz a Dave solo album, but TMYTL is clearly better. Then we get down 
into the fine print. I'd have trouble deciding between TMYTL and any of 
_Sonic Attack_, flawed though it be, _Church of Hawkwind_ or _Space 
Bandits_. For some reason _Church_ is a very nice unit, even though 
perhaps it's not electrically exciting; on the other hand it's 
questionable what one loses off _Space Bandits_ if one can still own 
_California Brainstorm_. So I guess in a pinch I'd keep _Space 
Bandits_ and _Church_ in the ranks above and drop _Sonic Attack_, 
some of which I like but some of which is really tedious, below. All the 
other core albums I'd probably take over TMYTL, except that if I was 
allowed to keep _Love in Space_ I'd keep TMYTL rather than _Alien4_ (but 
if we were only ranking studio albums _Alien4_ would beat it), and 
actually _Yule Ritual_, good though it is, doesn't really do anything 
that some other live album somewhere doesn't do better. 

	So, at that rate, I guess that currently TMYTL is 9th from the 
bottom, out of what, 34 core albums? Not so great perhaps, maybe you 
were right to question my commitment to it, but I'm still quite pleased 
by it as an album. I mean, most of the ones I've ranked below it I like 
in some way, it's really only _Zones_ and IYA I find genuinely 
unsatisfactory and even they have things on that still make me play 
them. O&I is pretty pointless too, basically I don't like the bag-of-
bits approach to an album, TiHDnP excepted because it's all great stuff. 
Even these days, annoyed and disappointed, I remain a fan, you know. 
Yours,
	Jon

ObMP3: Amon Tobin - `Chomp Samba'
-- 
"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