NEW ALBUMS
HAWKWIND
Somnia CHERRY RED
7/10
Brock and co continue their questing with album No 34
EMMA LEE PHOTOGRAPHY
What with the world’s billionaires eager to blast beyond the stratosphere, surely there’s enough room on a rocket to finally get Dave Brock up there. For the time being, Hawkwind’s leader gamely continues to fulfill his fellow Earth-dwellers’ appetite for scraggly space rock. Compared with recent Hawkwind bruisers, Somnia is a milder and dreamier affair, the need for the players to record their parts separately owing to lockdown measures having apparently resulted in a greater preponderance of quasiambient, poetry-forward noodling. Nevertheless, the mutant bossa nova on “Strange Objects In Space”, bluesy choogle of “I Can’t Get You Out Of Mind”, and full berserker mode of “Strange Encounters” all provide enough fuel to send them careening off the launch pad.