To infinity and beyond! The space rock icons’ late-career renaissance continues on their 36th studio album.

Words: Jeremy Allen Illustration: Mark Leary

Edited by Dave Everley prog.reviews@futurenet.com

Hawkwind’s 21st-century renaissance may never quite live up to the Liberty/UA years, but that doesn’t stop them trying. Their time on Cherry Red, from 2016’s The Machine Stops onwards, has lasted longer and been more productive than any other period in their lengthy career.

It’s been a surprisingly robust and consistent eight years, with a new record arriving in each calendar year (counting 2022’s live We Are Looking In On You album). Dave Brock’s interchangeable cast of merry men (and occasional woman) may no longer have youth on their side, and they might miss some of the visual swagger of graphic designer Barney Bubbles with his impudent hidden references and outlandish folded cardboard sleeves, but make no mistake, the Hawkwind of the present are a force to be reckoned with.

Stories From Time And Space –a HG Wellsian title if ever there was one –shares some of the visual symmetry of Space Ritual. It has an ominous-looking clock on the cover with an almost futuristic “2024” written across the face; it’s a date that has the dystopian ring of vintage sci-fi about it, made all the more surreal given that Hawkwind are still here putting out albums 55 years after they first emerged out of Ladbroke Grove.

A band that have always looked forwards have been looking rearwards with recent ventures: The Future Never Waits from last year was arranged so that the album ran backwards sequentially. Here, songs –like thoughts – are more fragmented, with reminiscences and future projections overlapping each other like the components of a vast collage. Moreover, the album plays the neat trick of presenting sonic space on the one hand and intricacy on the other, with each new play likely to offer up further detail that might have gone unnoticed previously.

Opener Our Lives Can’t Last Forever is a strange place to start, even if it sets things up thematically. It feels a little over-earnest and distinctly uncosmic on a first listen: a power ballad that treads similar ground to post-Waters-era Pink Floyd, with some curious choices made at the mixing desk as the organ overrides everything while Brock’s vocal sits deep in the mix, and yet the fragility and the sincerity of the song save it. It’s a pragmatic and characteristically pessimistic assessment of man’s long-term chances, and when Brock sings about the lines on his face reflected in the mirror, he’s addressing his own mortality. Aged 82, and having suffered a spell of ill-health recently, one suspects it’s probably something that crosses his mind from time to time.

Stories From Time And Space

CHERRY RED

Adeeply cosmic record that’s out there with their very best.

That opener vastly contrasts with The Starship (One Love One Life), a space banger that has a transcendent quality with a Rastafari philosophy and a Latin groove, and one that would sound magnificent covered by John Shuttleworth on a Bontempi organ, such is its charm. It, along with Till I Found You, is one of the finer latter-day Hawkwind songs; both have indelible melodies imprinted on unusual grooves that lodge easily in the cerebral cortex. The same, too, can be said for the pounding near title track Traveller Of Time & Space, which is grounded by an infectious two-part harmony and offset by vertiginous Frippertronic-style guitars. It breaks down at the midway point as theremins and ascending strings appear out of nowhere like benign invaders entering the empyrean.

What Are We Going To Do While We’re Here further exemplifies this playful shifting within the same landscape, drifting from ambient noodling to attacking motorik urgency, resplendent with forceful, distorted guitars and what sounds like space static from György Ligeti’s soundtrack to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that weren’t enough transmogrifying for one lifetime, the whole thing then slips into a smooth sax break at the conclusion. It’s not all wild sprawl, with short intermissions of ambient mood such as Eternal Light –redolent this time of an Eduard Artemyev soundtrack from one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 70s sci-fi epics –and The Black Sea, which tacitly references Ligeti again.

Artemyev and Ligeti are appropriate references given the cinematic scope of Stories From Time And Space, and the fact it takes us on a journey reminiscent of those bold, strange, ambitious sci-fi pictures that demand to be looked at on the big screen in an unrestored 70mm print. The further we venture, the more it feels like being lost in deep space with only memories for company, and the creeping sense that the voyage might all be one big trip. This is transportative music that offers up lost futures and moments of nostalgia for evocations that may never have belonged to us in the first place. Stories From Time And Space is a deeply cosmic record, that might just be out there with their very best.

A BURIAL AT SEA

Closer To Home PELAGIC Irish instrumental post-rock duo dream of home on second album.

In the four years since their self-titled debut, A Burial At Sea moved from their native Ireland to

Liverpool. Closer To Home sees the duo drawing inspiration from their homeland, its culture and cragged landscapes.

There’s a dichotomy to the record: for every moment like the lulling ambience of Páirc Béal Uisce, there’s a more abrasive counterpoint, typified by the pinball-machine-caughtin-a-hurricane riff that spearheads Gorse Bush On Fire. On Hy-Brasil, they flaunt both sides of their sonic coin, with wistful brass harmonies icing twangy math rock guitars before a monsoon of distortion and reverb takes over.

There are all the textures that can be expected from a post-rock band – shimmery guitars, daydreaming drums and sad cinema crescendos – but added brass gives the band a distinct edge. It gives Everything You Are Not a wistful, melancholic flavour, though that instrumentation is more acrobatic on

Dall, with its haunting horns, oceanmimicking cymbal swells and an air of bittersweet triumph. There’s nothing bittersweet about the record though – Closer To Home is carefully crafted and expertly executed.

POW

ADULT CINEMA

365 ILLICIT RECORDINGS Blockbuster concept suite creates annus mirabilis.

Mike Weston has been self-releasing DIY albums as Adult Cinema for some years, but his fourth is his first to go heroically, unabashedly ‘full prog’.

Four tracks, each around 15 minutes, build a kind of four seasons suite, with each piece evoking the balance between optimism and pessimism of the year’s cycle and, by extension, the arc of life. It could be absurdly overambitious. By the end, he’s knocked it out of the park.

Mostly instrumental, 365 doffs its hat to the epic monoliths of Wakeman, Pink Floyd and even Tangerine Dream, but does so with such enthusiasm and gusto

that it sweeps the listener along on its meticulously paced journey. The vocal interjections, from Asian chatter to a reggae toast, are perhaps the least effective ingredients (on Spring, they kill the vibe), but musically this surges seamlessly between Jarre-like electronic pulses to organic, orgiastic rock, complete with Gilmour-esque solos.

There’s remarkable sleight of hand in the way Summer shifts (with a dash of The Isleys) from cosmic soul to heated jams, and Winter, naturally more pensive, eventually sees sunshine melting the frost. A very good year.

CR

ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE

Distant Glow ARTIFICIALLANGUAGE.BANDCAMP.COM US prog metallers deliver impressive concept.