HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN GRILL

Hall of The Mountain Grill is a deserving try from Hawkwind to open up their dense sound and introduce some symphonic elements into their murk: nice goodies such as a melody, a song structure and mellotron! I've always liked this album but I believe the good stuff doesn't justify anything above 3.5 stars. Similar albums such as Warrior On The Edge Of Time and Levetition are a lot more successful.

The Psychedellic Warlords is a Hawkwind classic; with their typical rhythmic guitar strumming and the simple but effective pace of it. The songs has a more complex build then anything their tried before, with declamatory verses, a bit of a bridge and a beautiful mellotroned chorus.

Wind of Change is a moody instrumental with great mellotron and keyboard playing. Also D-Rider features lush spacey keyboards. The guitar riff is very typical again, in fact, Hawkwind is so happy playing this middle-eastern inspired rhythmic strumming that they overdid it and used the exact same riff and rhythm on the closing track Paradox. It's my main criticism with the album. Despite the will to progress and a number of good ideas, the album has too few of them and ends up too repetitive and inconsistent for me.

Web Weavers is another track that re-uses the exact same ideas as Paradox, this time it's the vocal melody that is copied over. Were they too stoned to notice?

You'd Better Believe It is another piece that sounds too Hawkwind cliché, besides the muddy production of the album starts to annoy by the time I'm that deep into the album. I usually skip this one. Next on is some filler, the title track is an ok piano piece but nothing remarkable, Goat Willow is completely pointless. Actually, since Paradox only rehashes previous ideas, only Lemmy's Lost Johnny can charm me, but it's hardly his best work.

There is a limit to the amount of self-plagiarism that I can handle and Hawkwind crossed it too many times here. With about 20 minutes of quality material I feel that even 3 stars are flattering. Don't ignore the more accomplished executions of this style on Warrior On The Edge Of Time and Levitition though!