CHURCH OF HAWKWIND

I am not at all a fan of 70's Hawkwind, but in that decade they at least had a pretty clear conception of their own musical direction; Space Rock until 1977, and then New Wave-ish music for the rest of the decade. Even though the 80's started out very well indeed for Hawkwind with their best ever album in 1980's Levitation, this proved to be a one-off success and they quickly found themselves lost. 1981's Sonic Attack seemed to revert to an earlier stage in their evolution and as such explored no new ground but found them plodding along in the same established style. The present album, to the contrary, is rather different from anything they had ever done before. There are still traces of the Hawkwind we know, but this is much more electronic. Overall, I think that this album is pretty directionless and contains a bit of this and a bit of that without any overall musical or lyrical theme or concept to hold it together. Many of the pieces are best described as experimental. Still, despite all its flaws, I actually don't think that this album is any worse than most of their 70's works that fail to impress this reviewer.

If Sonic Attack radically failed to live up to the expectations set by the surprisingly excellent Levitation, Church Of Hawkwind does not help their cause one bit. They at least tried to expand their horizons somewhat here, but most of the time it comes across as a failed experiment.

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