Hawkwind - Church Of Hawkwind

(CD 1982/2010, 61:45, Esoteric recordings ATOMCD1021)

The tracks:
  1- Angel Voices
  2- Nuclear Drive
  3- Star Cannibal
  4- The Phenomenon of Luminosity
  5- Fall Of Earth City
  6- The Church
  7- The Joker At The Gate
  8- Some People Never Die
  9- Light Specific Data
10- The Last Messiah
11- Looking In The Future
12- Angel Voices (extended version)
13- Harvey's Sequence
14- Fall Of Earth City (alternate version)
15- Water Music (Light Specific Data)
16- Looking In The Future/Virgin Of The World

Hawkwind Website        samples        Atomhenge Records


Church Of Hawkwind is a bit of an odd release in the vast Hawkwind-catalogue. Hot on the heels of the successful Sonic Attack-album, space captain David Brock (guitar, keyboards, vocals), together with space cadet Harvey Bainbridge (bass, keyboards, synths) decided to try to join in with the fledgling electronic (dance) scene which had just been started in the UK. The track The Joker At The Gate even sounds like a Jean Michel Jarre composition! As a result, many of the songs on Churc h Of Hawkwind are very electronic with an understated feel. To be quite frank, this generally makes them rather boring, because the boys didn't really know how to write interesting electronic compositions. Just repeating a theme for five minutes doesn't make good EM! The best songs therefore are the ones which herald back to the old Hawkwind-days on which guitar player Huw Lloyd-Langton could go all out, like the second part of Star Cannibal and Light Specific Data. Although the album entered the charts in the UK, a year later Hawkwind sensibly decided to go back to the rock format and released the excellent album Choose Your Masques. For those people who are interested: the re-release of Church Of Hawkwind contains five bonus tracks.

**­- André de Waal (edited by Peter Willemsen)

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