HAWKWIND – Psychedelic Selection – review – spacerock / psych

HAWKWIND – Psychedelic Selection – review
Cherry Red

Eh? What you up to, lads? We’ve had this sort of collywobbles before. “Spacehawks”. Back in 2013. “Composed largely of re-recorded and remixed material.” And now we’ve got “Psychedelic Selection”. Which is “Unreleased, re-recorded, and new material, covering 2012-2026”. How did Bob Calvert manage to co-write one of the tunes, then? Eh? Eh?

Hawkwind have actually been on a decent run of form lately. It’s not as good as people make it out to be but the nine albums since 2016 have all had their moments. Granted, I’d struggle to tell “The Future Never Waits” from “Stories from Time and Space” from “There Is No Space for Us”, but they’re excellent on the ear.

So, have they finally run out of steam? Let’s see.

There’s a lot of Dave Brock here. For sure, it’s his band, so he can do what he likes. But do I really want to hear some of his solo offerings? No. I’ve heard his solo offerings. Do I want to hear ‘new’ versions of ‘Hurry On Sundown’ and ‘The Demented Man’? Not so much, although the former does feature the last recording of Huw Lloyd-Langton which they’ve left lying around since 2012.

Dave Brock’s unreleased “Dance and Trance” material, of which there is a fair swatch is, um, yeah. The record finally comes into its own at the end with . ‘Goonhilly Down’ leading into the Magnus Martin solo ‘Ocean’s Spiral’, then the closing band track ‘Traveller Of Space’. Tack on ‘There Are Fairies In The Garden’ and you’ve got a decent EP.

For completists only, and the four people who only live to hear Dave Brocks synths. Off with it, to the Big Box of Hawkwind stuff in the corner.

It is available from some real life shops, and also available on the interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite to sell products you could get in real life. This includes the Evil Amazonian Empire.

This is a static ‘video’ of one of the tunes that appears on the album.