ASTOUNDING SOUNDS, AMAZING MUSIC

A tad underrated, I guess that's because Lemmy is gone, but I really think this album is killer! I really don't see what's wrong with this album. Not metallic enough? Robert Calvert rejoined the group, which I thought was a great asset to the band, so long as he didn't get all mental on them. First you start off with "Reefer Madness", an obvious reference to the black and white movie. It's a great opening piece, and I love those synth solos. Then you have "Steppenwolf", which just simply blows me away! This song first appeared, in a much more synth-dominated form on Adrian Wagner's The Distances Between Us (1974) (Calvert wrote the song, Wagner had also appeared on Calvert's solo album Captain Lockheed & the Starfighters). Hawkwind's version is much longer, and the whole song is absolutely killer! "City of Lagoons" is an instrumental piece, with spacy synths and what sounds like a phased Mellotron (since Simon House did use Mellotron on their previous two albums, Warrior on the Edge of Time and Hall of the Mountain Grill). "The Aubergine that Ate Rangoon" is an instrumental synth-dominated number. The only song I thought was mediocre was "Kerb Crawler", it sounded more like a generic rock and roller with female backup vocals. It sounded like Hawkwind going commercial here. But they redeem themselves big time with "Kadu Flyer". It stars off rocking, but towards the end it gets all Eastern with the use of sitar. The last is a moody instrumental "Chronoglide Skyway", which sounds to my ears dominated by phased Mellotron (amongst the phasing, it really sounds like I can detect it's a Mellotron).

Really, this is another wonderful album from Hawkwind, and even "Kerb Crawler" doesn't weaken my opinion of this album. To me, it's just another must-have album from Hawkwind!