SPACE RITUAL

Space Ritual is the album where all the crazy ingredients that make Hawkwind such a distinctive band came together - lyrics from Michael Moorcock, read by Robert Calvert, nude dancers on the cover and Lemmy chugging away at a bass that sounds like a thousand steam trains driving across the stage. The material on this album - mostly from Doremi Fasol Latido, but with one pick from In Search of Space (a super-heavy version of Master of the Universe) and scads of new songs besides - is given a raw, dirty, heavy as hell treatment by the band, in a two-disc orgy of brutal noise which more than explains why of all the prog giants of the 1970s, Hawkwind was the one that the punk rockers embraced instead of attacking.

That isn't to say that what we have here isn't the usual Hawkwind tripped-out space rock, but it's given such a thunderous, bombastic rendition on this album that it's hard not to see most of these songs as the definitive versions of the material in question. Here, spaciness is achieved not through gentle, tranquil synth lines, but through sheer noise and hypnotic rhythms, leaving Hawkwind sounding much like a particularly brutal Krautrock band in this show. Go back to one of the previous two albums after listening to Space Ritual and it's hard to hear the songs as not being pallid, sickly versions of the renditions on here. One of Hawkwind's greatest accomplishment - perhaps their greatest accomplishment full stop.