DOREMI FASOL LATIDO

Hawkwind's third album sees the group struggling against difficult circumstances and turning these problems into opportunities. For starters, it's the first album with Lemmy on bass - an instrument he wasn't used to, having learned to play lead guitar, with the result that his playing is somewhat unorthodox on here - and it was recorded in Rockfield Studios at a point when the studios were just a barn with mattresses on the walls.

As a result, the mix of the album is murky, but in a stroke of genius which laid the groundwork for the sound of Hawkwind's classic period, the band decided to make that very murk a defining feature of their sound. On the best songs, such as the opening Brainstorm, the thunderous basslines, mysterious synthesiser tweets, and portentious vocals emerge from out of the fog and merge to create a strange, hypnotic melange. Whilst material like the closing The Watcher is a bit weak, the bulk of the album follows the lead of Brainstorm and the end result is a fascinating slice of space rock, with the lo-fi production values and Lemmy's bass technique giving it an almost proto-punk edge that sets this incarnation of Hawkwind apart from gentler, smoother, less abrasive space rock groups.

Still, I have to admit that Space Ritual just plain sounds better, and I tend to prefer the versions of this album's songs to be found on there. So four stars.