HW Knights of Space

[mike coleman]

Jon, I absolutely love Dangerous Vision!!! I Fucking love it!!!    of
course, arguments about my sanity could easily be made against me and I'd
just be complimented.........I won't go any further because this is your
territory and I respect everyone's station but I will butt right out by
saying....Zones comes as close to the brown note (I think) as Mary's gonna
get with the whistle (which I have always loved from day one), or at least
the psycoacoocoostiks, just ask her how she's affected....
(agreed the rest of the album has always been a bit lacklustre but I still
haven't peeled off either of my Japanese copy's...)
On 8/23/08, Jonathan Jarrett <jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 07:54:33AM -0500, Carl Edlund Anderson typed out:
> > Purely out of curiosity, I now find myself wondering what you would
> > pick as their worst album and how many stand between it and TMTYL? :)
>
>        Well, there's a question. I think their worst, for me, is
> unquestionably _Zones_, a hodge-podge of sub-par live material redeemed
> from scratched plastic monotony only by a few moments of tension, and
> studio offerings that should never have been committed to tape
> (`Dangerous Visions', I'm looking at you). I also don't reckon
> IitBotFtbD very much, I mean it's not bad but it's not exciting at all,
> to me at least. IYA has some excellent stuff on it but is marred by
> badly-edited Rizz and is perhaps the most schizophrenically-split of all
> HW albums, Dave on one side and a band on the other and when the twain
> meet it's got Rizz all over it (I was much happier with him on _Hawkwind
> 1997_). _Out and Intake_ is like _Zones_ only without the extremes
> and with more anonymous production. And I like _Spacebrock_ for what it
> is, viz a Dave solo album, but TMYTL is clearly better. Then we get down
> into the fine print. I'd have trouble deciding between TMYTL and any of
> _Sonic Attack_, flawed though it be, _Church of Hawkwind_ or _Space
> Bandits_. For some reason _Church_ is a very nice unit, even though
> perhaps it's not electrically exciting; on the other hand it's
> questionable what one loses off _Space Bandits_ if one can still own
> _California Brainstorm_. So I guess in a pinch I'd keep _Space
> Bandits_ and _Church_ in the ranks above and drop _Sonic Attack_,
> some of which I like but some of which is really tedious, below. All the
> other core albums I'd probably take over TMYTL, except that if I was
> allowed to keep _Love in Space_ I'd keep TMYTL rather than _Alien4_ (but
> if we were only ranking studio albums _Alien4_ would beat it), and
> actually _Yule Ritual_, good though it is, doesn't really do anything
> that some other live album somewhere doesn't do better.
>
>        So, at that rate, I guess that currently TMYTL is 9th from the
> bottom, out of what, 34 core albums? Not so great perhaps, maybe you
> were right to question my commitment to it, but I'm still quite pleased
> by it as an album. I mean, most of the ones I've ranked below it I like
> in some way, it's really only _Zones_ and IYA I find genuinely
> unsatisfactory and even they have things on that still make me play
> them. O&I is pretty pointless too, basically I don't like the bag-of-
> bits approach to an album, TiHDnP excepted because it's all great stuff.
> Even these days, annoyed and disappointed, I remain a fan, you know.
> Yours,
>        Jon
>
> ObMP3: Amon Tobin - `Chomp Samba'
> --
> "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
>