BLOOD OF THE EARTH

There was a while there when Hawkwind was, whilst still a very fine live band, a bit of a muddle in the studio. Different listeners will put the marker in different places, but to me it came about somewhere in the mid-1990s. Alien 4 and Distant Horizons were OK-to-good albums, but the Love In Space live album which came out in between them beat the pants off them, and a string of subsequent studio albums seemed to be cobbled-together from rerecordings of old material, live bits, archival bits, and underbaked new ideas.

The good ship Hawkwind seems to have righted itself as far as studio work goes with the majestic Blood of the Earth, which sees a returning Tim Blake teaming up with Hawkwind founder and sole consistent member Dave Brock, well-tenured drummer Richard Chadwick (who holds the record for "longest continuous membership of Hawkwind for anyone who isn't Dave Brock"), and new lads Niall Hone and Mr. Dibs to offer a spacey psychedelic trip into some of Hawkwind's strangest territory yet.

The opening two pieces, Seahawks and the title track, are big on samples, electronic effects, distorted vocals, and all-out weirdness, with Wraith being the first actual rock song on here (and even then it's spiced up with plenty of the sorts of electronic textures we've come to expect from the Hawks). This gives you the picture of how the album proceeds, with progressive space rock instrumental stretches coalescing into more boisterous songs here and there. There's still some reworking of old material here, but in this case the reworking is sufficiently radical and suited to the style of this album that it feels justified - like those songs really would be the right artistic move at the point in the album they arrive, rather than being worked in for the sake of filler.

It's not a million light years away from Hawkwind's accustomed style - especially if you've heard their 1990s stuff - but it's a very deft modernisation and implementation of it, making Blood of the Earth perhaps the most satisfying Hawkwind album since It Is The Business of the Future To Be Dangerous.