following the reaper wrote:
I saw a live album called 'space ritual....(i forget the rest of the title)' in my local record store. Is this any good?
Space Ritual is occasionally considered to be the first live concept album in rock history. Besides the fact that there are other candidates for this, there is the question what the concept should be. Well, all tracks are dealing somehow with space. It is not clear, if they refer to the endless space of the universe or the inner space in the deepest dephts of the consciousness. Today mankind is far more enlightend than 30 years ago, so we know that this boils down to the same.
The musical concept is simple but effective. Fast and heavy tracks are connected by spherical electronic soundscapes. The songs themselfes are built quite simple and serve as stepping stones into large jam-sessions. Booster is the phenomenal bass of Lemmy. He is rolling, rumbling, pushing and hitting, thereby swinging like a madman. Dave Brock (guitar) und Nick Turner (sax, flute) chip in long improvisations, in which they can't deny a certain degree of dilettantism. These jams are spiced up with a lot of weird noises and effects from audiogenerators and proto-synths.
However, you can never grab the essentials of music with words and analysis. Music also transports a sublimal message beyond the audible, and here Hawkwind have to offer
je ne sais quoi - or let's say: magic. How else could it be explained, that a third class skilled combo is one of the most collected bands in the world and that even stinkeroo bootlegs are traded for triple-digit amounts?
'Space Ritual' ist far more than a live recording, it is an existential experience, a spiritual adventure, a trip into other realities of the multi-dimensional cosmos... got the point?
99 of 100 listeres will find this album quite "off-key", "way-out", "stoned", or simply "daft". But the 100th will be chaught, the magic will grap him, and nothing will be the same again...
