Hawkwind is back with album number 4723 in their vast catalog, The Future Never Waits! I kid, kind of. It is amazing that these guys are still pumping out new albums considering they started as a band in 1969 and have been super influential on any band who is doing any version the space rock out there today.
Right off the bat on The Future Never Waits you get a signature ten-minute instrumental space out jam with the title track. Pops, clicks, asteroids, droid sounds, it’s all there and what you would expect from the band. Hawkwind pick up the pace and rock out on the next track, The End, which is one of their best songs in many years. It’s a kind of raw straight-ahead rocker with all those outer space sounds and a sweet synth solo.
I am not saying anything you don’t know if you are familiar with this band, but The Future Never Waits is very long. Seventy minutes tries your attention span. I could see this whittled down to forty-five and being a much more ingestible listen, but hey, if you are here for Hawkwind you already are prepared. I could skip tracks like Aldous Huxley that really act as a five-minute placeholder/interlude that is not necessary.
If you are a Hawkwind fan, you will dig this. The question is for how long? Does this have staying power in an already huge and excellent discography? For me, maybe, but for the Hawkwind diehards it will be interesting to see if The Future Never Waits gets more than one or two nostalgia spins or if this becomes heavy rotation material for the forceable future. I lean towards the former. 7/10
Mars Red Sky & Queen Of The Meadow - Mars Red Sky & Queen Of The Meadow (Mrs Red Sound and Vicious Circle Records) [David Karpel]
Mars Red Sky, a cornerstone of the French stoner rock scene, are back with a three track EP that refreshes everything we know about the band and forces us to look forward with anticipation for more of this. As the EP title suggests, Mars Red Sky & Queen Of The Meadow, these tracks showcase a collaboration. Queen Of The Meadow, an indie folk band, is made up of singer-songwriter Helen Ferguson and Mars Red Sky vocalist Julien Pras. Their voices–individually or harmonized–combine hypnotically with the deep, slow, and low, fuzzy riffing of Pras on guitars and bassist Jimmy Kinast.
They world-build a fantastical landscape of madness Matgaz makes mountainous with his heavy hitting drums. The first song, Maps Of Inferno, is a seven minute monster of a track. (The third song on this EP is a shortened version of the first.) Pras has always had a captivating, almost at times ethereal voice. The addition of Ferguson adds a dimension to Mars Red Sky that reveals new possibilities of melody and psychedelica. The mix is gloriously awash in fuzz while amazingly pristine with clarity. That saturation mixed with clarity continues in the second track, Out At Large, a song that captures a head caressing melody over deep water hooks.
The songwriting, production, the mastering, the mix, everything is working at newer and better levels for these guys. Mars Red Sky is adept at creating walls of tremendous riffs with opiate grooves. In that way, these songs fit neatly into their catalog, and for my ears, at the top. These tracks push them forward. In these huge sounding songs, in the midst of the maelstrom, Ferguson and Pras help the band take flight into a new world of heavy, psychedelic dark folk. We hope they keep flying. 8/10
Evermore – In Memoriam (Scarlet Records) [Zak Skane]
I usually find power metal quite cheesy and over the top, but Evermore alongside bands like Orden Ogan have regained my trust in the sub-genre. From the bombastic symphonic section of their Nova Aurora to their title track In Memoriam this band knows how to move and exite the most hard to win audience of the genre. For fans of Iron Maiden and Orden Ogan. 8/10.
Ascending Olympus - Frontiers (Drakkar Productions) [Matt Bladen]
The rhythm section and the grizzled vocals of Andreas Lohiotatos immediately making think of Bolt Thrower, while the guitars of Costas Papadopoulos are quite varied and impressive with more than a touch of Coroner. The epic themes of Greek history inspire the lyrics of these 10 tracks across 40-something minutes the tone changing on Hell Is In My Eyes, the thrashier style of A Call To Arms, which features Mario's Dupont of Lucifer's Call on vocals while Death Will Come getting into more modern death realms as does I Of The Damantion.
Grunting, grooving death metal, Frontiers is a definitive first statement from Ascending Olympus, get those pits going. 8/10