WARRIOR ON THE EDGE OF TIME

Without a doubt, this is Hawkwind's masterpiece. While they've got quite a few excellent albums under their belt, nothing else in their discography even touches this one for me.

The band traded their "in-house poet" Robert Calvert for a close friend of his, SF author Michael Moorcock, and what resulted from the collaboration was a concept album based around Moorcock's Eternal Champion mythology, in particular the central novel of the same name (which serves as the source of the poetic interlude "Warriors"). Unlike his later record with the band (1985's Chronicle of the Black Sword), this album is not a direct adaptation of any of his novels, but more a loose translation of the Eternal Champion concept into music. Most of the lyrics on the album are either original, or drawn from existing sources outside Moorcock's fiction, but thematically all tie into or evoke the Champion concept in some way. Three poems directly written by Moorcock ("The Wizard Blew His Horn", "Standing at the Edge", and "Warriors") serve as interludes of sorts, more closely anchoring the album to the concept and outlining its broad scope. While Moorcock's strength as a writer is his prose fiction rather than his poetry, and he's no Calvert, these poems and their accompanying soundscapes serve as fantastic mood pieces with imagery that evokes the psychedelic sword and sorcery of the Eternal Champion mythos.

As for the music, what's here is absolutely fantastic, especially the first half of the record. "Assault and Battery" and "The Golden Void", while listed as separate-but-paired tracks on the original release of the album, really are just two movements in a ten-minute piece that serves as a near-perfect introduction to the record and one of Hawkwind's best studio recordings. A driving rhythm section, the band's characteristically "spacey" keyboards, and perfectly-placed flute work create an unforgettable atmosphere that immediately transports you to the tragic and fantastical worlds inhabited by the Eternal Champion. I can't dissociate this song from the feeling of flying or gliding in the first half, then a plunge through a 2001-esque cosmic tunnel in the second. The excerpts from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Psalm of Life in Assault and Battery give way to the more purely psychedelic imagery of The Golden Void, whose repeated chants of "down a corridor of flame" and "on the edge of time!" in conjunction with the instrumental builds into a climax topped off by an excellent saxophone solo.

After "The Wizard Blew His Horn" introduces the Champion to us and calls him to service, we find ourselves in a bit of a detour with "Opa-Loka", a droning instrumental whose motorik beat evokes a lot of the krautrock Hawkwind's 70s work is adjacent to. "The Demented Man", which closes out Side A, is perhaps the album's most conventional track, being a fairly simple ballad lacking the usual psychedelic weirdness, but this is easily compensated for by the melancholy atmosphere conjured by the Mellotrons in its instrumental section. (On some releases, the track is called "The Demented King", a title I find much more thematically appropriate and evocative)

Side B's opener, "Magnu", is the album's peak. While the rhythm section is just as driving as that of the opening track(s), the synths and wind instruments here are significantly more "winding" and anarchic, a blend of order and chaos perfectly fitting the album's inspirations. The lyrics weave together a Percy Shelley poem with a magical incantation from an old Slavic folktale, the combination of which creates the appropriate imagery of a mythic hero atop a flying steed who wields a holy cleansing light. The tone here is anything but conventionally triumphant, however, with a wild feeling far more suited to Moorcock's tragic antiheroes. There's no better way to conclude the song than the chant "until we diminish by the reign of night" slowly descending into distortion as the song fades out. Easily my favorite song here, only matched by Golden Void.

It is at this point where I must offer my lone criticism of Warrior on the Edge of Time: the tracks following Magnu on the rest of Side B do not quite reach the heights of the material preceding them. All of them are still excellent, and the album works very well as a coherent piece, but none quite capture my imagination and emotions the way that the first half of the album does. I definitely prefer Nik Turner's "Dying Seas" to Simon House's "Spiral Galaxy 28948", mostly thanks to the former creating a fittingly "aquatic' atmosphere with both its synth-driven instrumental and filter over the vocals. Spiral Galaxy does deserve some credit for capturing some of the same chaos as Magnu, though, and it certainly delivers on the mood one would expect from an instrumental with its title.

The closing track, "Kings of Speed", is the only direct lyrical contribution from Moorcock outside the poems. Like Demented Man, it's more on the conventional side, being the album's only straightforward rock song (albeit one drenched in the usual spacey Hawkwind sound). Weirdly, I feel it's near-perfect as a closer despite it seeming a little out of place next to the rest of the album.

Lemmy's "Motorhead", wound up not making the cut for the album, but did see release as the B-side to Kings of Speed. His frustrations while working on this album drove Lemmy to depart for an even more successful career at the helm of his band of the same name. Re-releases of the album frequently include it as a bonus track, but I really don't think it belongs here, especially not just tacked onto the end (not that it's a bad song in a vacuum).

Despite my misgivings about the album's dip in quality on the second side, going from "mind-blowingly fantastic" to "really good" is not much of a reason to complain. Considered as a whole this remains a near-perfect album and Hawkwind's best. Now if only we'd get a re-release of the vinyl that included the fold-out Chaos shield that was part of the original run's packaging...

BEST TRACK: Magnu

WEAKEST TRACK: Spiral Galaxy 28948

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