OFF: Re: Sympathy For The Devil (Motorhead new album taster)

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 07 Sep 2015, at 09:59 , Jonathan Jarrett <jjarrett at CORIOLIS.GREENEND.ORG.UK> wrote:
> I'd say that the new Krankschaft album ... a bit less schizophrenically than the current Hawkwind build pattern (songs by Dibs and Niall and Richard, songs by Dave that could equally be on his solo albums, a song by Tim, some sci-fi sytnth linkage). I actually quite like all of this severally, I'd just like there to be more behind the albums to make them units than 'this is the set of songs we jointly and severally came up with this year'. Of course, that's only because there are high bars to cross in terms of relative coherence of sound, at least, in the Hawkwind canon, and most other bands would struggle to do something sounding as professional and crafted as _Onward_. But that doesn't mean that it sounds like a single band who did it…

I would guess that this might easily be an artefact of the various band members actually cooking up demo songs on their own, and these getting incorporated into an album package with a bit of re-recording and re-production once they cart the demos over to Dave’s studio. It’s sort of like “we’re a bunch of guys who play on each others solo pieces, which we release together”. I don’t think this is anything new in the Hawkwind camp (and we can point to similar dynamics in many bands that go back to the ‘70s, when it was becoming increasingly easy for musicians to at least do fairly complete sounding demos at home; cf. BÖC for the AoF sessions), but there are a fair number of cooks having at the broth these days, and in the “trio” or “augmented trio” eras (i.e. when Alan was onboard), well … Alan either consciously or unconsciously wrote really _Hawkwindy_ songs. So, naturally enough, when much of a given album was him and Dave, it all sounded pretty Hawkwindy.

> I would also, of course, like them to stop re-recording old songs for albums. Keep those for B-sides and bonus tracks, I say, let the new Hawkwind sing out instead on the main platter.

Indeed. Putting them on albums just makes things seem a bit weak. I’m not ideologically against bands re-recording stuff with up-to-date tech and lineups. I’ve heard examples of this practice that I think are very worthwhile; I’ve even heard examples from Hawkwind that I think are very worthwhile (I will uphold the “Assault & Battery/Golden Void” from _Palace Springs_ against all comers!). But the last 3 full-length Hawkwind albums seem to have something like 15 or 16 self-covers scattered across them; and that’s _after_ the 40th anniversary promo thing, which (admittedly more understandably) also had a bunch of self-covers. 

Is it my imagination, or is the last HW studio album to not include any self-covers actually … _It Is the Business of the Future to Be Dangerous_!?  (Even _Distant Horizons_ included the sort of instrumentally version of “Love in Space”, which had previously debuted on the _Love in Space_ live album!)

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/