HW: Big announcement???

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 03:27:20PM +0100, Carl Edlund Anderson typed out:
> Eh, well, while _DH_ is not exactly a great album, and I'm more than 
> happy to criticize HW when I think they're sucking :) I thought there a 
> few interesting moments on _DH_ (mostly courtesy of Mr. Tree, actually, 
> of whom I am not otherwise _that_ big a fan).  Admittedly, the album 
> didn't seem that finished and there was a lot of forgettable stuff, but 
> I wouldn't necessarily rate it worse than IITBOTFTBD ....

	I like the Ron stuff on DH a great deal, and Jerry's 
contributions too, but it did rather herald this trend whereby the rest 
of the band does songs and Dave does pieces and never the twain shall 
meet. I think that TMTYL actually avoids that quite well, all the 
component parts of the band meld nicely for the most part, the only 
tracks that clearly identified their main authors to me were `Greenback 
Massacre' and `Angela Android', even the latter of which has a Brock 
credit too. Meanwhile there isn't anything that immediately identified 
itself as Brock filler. DH was kind of towards the opposite extreme 
there and IYA was the peak of that particular line, where offstage it 
really did seem to be two separate bands.

	All the same, DH is one of the albums I do play more often than 
most, although I don't play HW half as much as I used to.

> If one took all the best HW compositions since 1990 and put them 
> together on an album produced with some serious muscle (I dunno, call 
> Rick Rubin or Chris Goss or someone :) then that would be a pretty good 
> album, IMO!

	I kind of agree that some new production muscle might make for a 
big difference. The production on _Spacebrock_, to me, is marvellous, 
clear and present, whereas TMTYL suffers from the same thing as 
DarXtar's _Tombola_, of having been in the guitarist's computer for a 
year or so too long and acquired too many layers to sound that fresh and 
immediate. So maybe they just need to keep rolling stuff out as 
quickly as is sensible :-) 

	Mainly it would be nice to see what someone with an aggressive 
vision could get the band to produce. But of course that's exactly what 
Dave has things set up to stop; he wants his vision instead and that's 
fair enough. It's not as if I can show that making other people's 
Hawkwind would make him more money. Yours,
					    Jon

-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk