BLOOD OF THE EARTH

For me this is the best Hawkwind album since "Love in Space" live record from the mid 1990's. I think "Blood of The Earth" album draws together the most pleasant key elements I appreciate in this band; Ambient soundscapes, shimmering frequencer voice carpets, futuristic aural textures enriched with poems and dictations, pulsing hypnotic space rock grooves, oriental scales and raw riff-oriented psychedelic rocking. All this synthesizes as a fine thematic album, which is finished with a very good production quality and taste.

Many tracks appear like bands 1970's-era songs performed with modern sounds, and this philosophy has been realized most strongly in the modernized version of "You'd Better Believe It". Jokes have mostly been left aside, and this record dives to more serious and threatening themes. Overall feeling is full with tension and sorrowful, released in a while with powerful space rock anthems, and soothed with sequences of abstract aural flows. Sounds are great, having very low bass frequencies, making this album a pleasure to listen with proper gear. The intensive musical trip is enhanced by good judgement used when building the song order selection. Distorted guitars have also really nice raw but not too tight tones, and all instruments are well heard after the mixing. Playing performance is also fine, drums rolling really energetically, supported by firm bass, and the guitars shine awesomely in solos and power riffs, mystified by rich cloaks of various synthesizer sounds. As an unnecessary anecdote, some of these pulsing sounded quite much like the sounds left familiar from Commodore 64 classic game Wizball.

I consider this as a very recommendable album for listening, whilst enjoying "the days we made", as the predicted future has became the truth like foretold by the band's seers earlier. I found all elements here pleasing and nothing annoying, and after a week of listening I would coronize it among my own personal favourites of this band, along with "Doremi Fasol Latido", "Hall of The Mountain Grill", "Space Ritual", "Warrior on The Edge of Time" and "Love in Space". It is both accessible, thought provoking and emotionally touching non-elitistic cosmic progressive rock music from a classic group, which introduced me to the psychedelic progressive rock music. I see it as a huge leap forward when compared to the other 21st century recordings of this band, in my most humble opinion.