One of the first things I thought about this group was that they sound a bit like Hawkwind. Given that they get classed under “space rock”, it’s perhaps unsurprising. The track How Does It Feel, for example, is around eight minutes long and the first five minutes are a simple repeated guitar motif with applied echo, before simple drums and vocals finally kick in. Suicide is another epic, eleven minutes worth of instrumental space-rock. They’re also quite psychedelic in the ways that the music is slightly hypnotic. Revolution, with its wall of noise guitar and thumping rhythm again sounds like a Hawkwind track, but then the lyrics sound more like the Iggy Pop track Bored, talking of “Well I’m sick, sooo sick”.
At the core, Spacemen 3 are Peter Kember and Jason Pierce, with Kember being a heavy drug user and Pierce later forming Spiritualized, so perhaps the blend of sounds is unsurprising. You know me, I like this kind of thing, but there are a couple of off-genre tracks that are both oddly incongruous with the album, but also oddly in keeping. So Hot (Wash Away All Of My Tears) is a slightly bluesy piece that comes in with vocals right away, when normally they are held back for a few minutes, if they occur at all. The album closes with Lord Can You Hear Me When I’m Gone, a kind of blues-gospel sound that somehow manages to work with the rest of the space rock. They’re not, I think, quite as good as Hawkwind at this kind of sound, lacking the robustness of the bassline and without quite as much swirliness up top, but I was pleased to have found them.
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