EKRANOPLAN

Trance inducing guitar riffs, synth sounds swooping and burbling along, blissed out guitar solos, forty-eight gallons of reverb and a further fifty of delay, how much more Space Rock can you get? And the answer is none! None more Space Rock! This is an album which certainly bears the mark of Hawkwind at their best, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Blue Cheer and pre-Dark Side Floyd and I must say I rather like it. There is not even a cursory nod to sounding new and contemporary with a firmly retro psychedelic sound firmly in place throughout and this suits me fine, but if you want bleeding edge innovation, complex melodic development, rhythmic experimentation and up to the minute sounds and grooves look elsewhere. If, however, you like the bands listed above I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy this collection no end.

It's quite common at the spacier end of prog for the vocals to be not particularly prominent in the mix and for the overall texture to be a fairly dense (but entirely beautiful) wall of sound and this definitely true of Ekranoplan. As a result, most of the time I have no idea what the singer is singing about but that's fine. He has a great voice and I'm too lazy to Google the lyrics and anyway they might be rubbish and that would taint my enjoyment. All the instrumentalists clearly know how to play and the lead guitar has a kind of garagey Gilmour quality to it that I find most appealing.

There isn't a duff track to be found here and my personal faves are track five "Occult Roots" and track eight, the instrumental "The Morning Maiden" which is probably the most old school sixties psychedelia sounding number but to be honest its all out the top drawer of the space rock cupboard and if that's your bag of mushrooms you'll like this album. Their second album "when Sleep Returned" is even better so I can't give this five stars but it's definitely a high four.