LIFE IN SPACE

This record by Hawkwind veteran Nik Turner (wind instruments, vocals) has the typical Hawkwind family attributes; both strong and weak. The opening song 'The End of the World' has a memorable progressive melancholy that works lovely with the spacey instrumentation. The second track 'Why Are You' sounds under produced compared to the rest of the album and should therefor not have been included in my opinion. From there on the album is a quite relaxing mixture of atmospheric space (hard)rock moments with often spoken words by Nik Turner. The ending track 'Masters of the Universe' is however a particularly lackluster version of the classic Hawkwind song. Replacing the weaker tracks with a few more completed songs with melodies like the strong opener would really have bumped up this record to the level of the much stronger 'Space Gypsy'. For the stronger fusion-influenced musicianship I would warmly recommend Turner's 'Space Fusion Odyssey', of which the shortened 1LP version is one of my favorite space albums. This album - of which the beautiful cover deserves to be mentioned - can't get my full recommendation.