CHURCH OF HAWKWIND

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Generally short tracks on this outing, with the heavy, driving "Damage of life" being the standout track by far.

A number of the "tracks" such as "Angel voices", "The Church", and "Joker at the gate", (which is at least melodic) are little more than ambient links. Of the other tracks, "Nuclear drive" is an inferior version of "Silver machine", "Looking at the future" is an alternative version of "Lives of Great men", and "Mist of Meridin" drifts off into ambient noises.

"Some people never die" has the live news broadcast of the death of JFK set to music (it does actually work).

Not Hawkwind's finest hour by any means, but some good moments nonetheless.

This Hawkwind period (82-83) is probably not the best one for the band.

"Church Of Hawkwind" is a collection of short songs dominated by electronic / computer and spacey background sounds. To make some illusion, I guess. Most of the songs are similar and there is not much to retain from such a work. This is by far the worst "Hawkwind" album so far.

Some lyrics are more spoken than sung, and this monotonous tone only adds to the boring feeling one gets while listening to the whole album in one session. Several short tracks are absolutely useless and excessively dull ("Angel Voices", "The Church").

I'm looking desperately for a decent song on this album. "Some People Never Die" has some flavour of "Suicide" at times. But this bizarre US band of the seventies was original in their times. "Hawkwind" is not here. And the voice-over on the "music" is quite indecent IMO (it was taped while JFK was shot).

"Damage Of Life" is bearable but the whole of this album is a very painful moment. Best avoided. One star.

"The Church of Hawkwind" is another very mediocre album with a few shining lights scattered here and there. Too many of Hawkwind's 80s albums were like this; lots of instrumentals and effects but no real songs to speak of. Oh well, there are 15 tracks so surely something will be worth salvaging here. The songs worth hunting down are 'Nuclear Drive', 'Damage of Life' and 'Some People Never Die', but the rest unfortunately are rather dull and uninspiring instrumentals.

'Nuclear Drive' is a rocker with Brock in fine form on vocals and some soaring space lead guitar from Huw Lloyd-Langton. It begins proceedings well however, the album dives into some awful New Wave punkish chanting vocals unfortunately on tracks such as 'Star Cannibal'. The spacey electronics are annoying on this rather than an augmentation. The lyrics are downright idiotic, about dining on human flesh. Hopefully the rest of the album will be better I was thinking at this stage.

This is followed by spaciness and drones on 'The Phenomenon of Luminosity' and it has the intriguing futuristic voice over and sequenced synth lines. The synths sound a bit like the early Kraftwerk sound from "Autobahn". Okay a bit of a filler but not bad with repetitive trance phrases.

Next is 'Fall of Earth City', with layers of synth and Brock's distant vocal narration. Once again not really a song but an instrumental with a bit of a spoken poetry.

Next, is 'The Church', a short thing with sequenced synths and some crowd protest chanting. I have no idea what this is saying but it works as a transition. There is tons of filler on this album such as 'Joker at the gate' which is nothing but a synth instrumental, with voice overs, but hardly inventive. Of the better tracks one should mention 'Some People Never Die' that has heavy breathing and effects sounding like Pink Floyd's 'On The Run'. There is even a sequenced section. "Oswald has been shot" speaks an urgent voice and it is evident that the piece is in tribute to the events of the assassination attempt. It is interesting on this album that sounds like a pot pourri of ideas rather than a coherent whole. I liked hearing the news reports and reporters though on this. It is rather powerful to hear about Senator J. F. Kennedy's assassination too, the screams are here and the actual reports "get the gun, stay away from the gun, his hand is broken".

'Damage of Life' is a better song as it at least feels like a song, running at a decent length and the musicianship is not just sequenced synths and voice overs. Brock's vocals are welcome after all the narrations previously, and the melody is quite pleasant. The musicianship is simple with crunching riffing guitars and spacey synths but this works well and is the definitive highlight amongst a sea of mediocre forgettable instrumentals.

'Mists of Meridan' is another instrumental based track, repeating the same droning sounds, but features some nice vocals from Madame X. She is not a space whisperer like Gilli Smyth but still nice to hear the feminine touch after all the raw vocals previous. It takes some patience to get through the track with ambiant layer upon layer of synth, and atmospherics pervading over all.

'Light Specific Data' is another instrumental based track, but has a cool guitar riff that locks in and I didn't mind all the spacey effects.

Overall the album suffers from being too focused on instrumentals and transitions rather than any decent memorable rock songs. There are only about 3 decent songs so this is a very disappointing affair. I can squeeze out 2 stars though as it still offers something for the Hawkwind collectors.

Not my place of worship

I am not at all a fan of 70's Hawkwind, but in that decade they at least had a pretty clear conception of their own musical direction; Space Rock until 1977, and then New Wave-ish music for the rest of the decade. Even though the 80's started out very well indeed for Hawkwind with their best ever album in 1980's Levitation, this proved to be a one-off success and they quickly found themselves lost. 1981's Sonic Attack seemed to revert to an earlier stage in their evolution and as such explored no new ground but found them plodding along in the same established style. The present album, to the contrary, is rather different from anything they had ever done before. There are still traces of the Hawkwind we know, but this is much more electronic. Overall, I think that this album is pretty directionless and contains a bit of this and a bit of that without any overall musical or lyrical theme or concept to hold it together. Many of the pieces are best described as experimental. Still, despite all its flaws, I actually don't think that this album is any worse than most of their 70's works that fail to impress this reviewer.

If Sonic Attack radically failed to live up to the expectations set by the surprisingly excellent Levitation, Church Of Hawkwind does not help their cause one bit. They at least tried to expand their horizons somewhat here, but most of the time it comes across as a failed experiment.