Tuesday 8 October 2019

Hawkwind - Choose Your Masques (1982)


The 13th album from these British legends.

The band was now a quintet with a lineup of guitars, bass, drums, synths, keyboards and vocals.
Three guest musicians provided saxophone and backing vocals.

.... And the band played on.... And still does (in 2019) in a rather different configuration. Hawkwind's music is mostly timeless and will always find a large live audience. And with good reasons.

Choose Your Masque, who became a big selling album, sees the band tone down their space rock and introduce a bit of mainstream rock and prog. This without much decline in quality.

Their new version of Silver Machine says everything about this album. It is a cleaned up, almost a nice, non-offensive version of this timeless classic. No Lemmy Kilmister barking out the words. No dirty sound. Just a relative nice song which with a lot of teeth as this song can never be sanitized.

The music here is nice. It still have a punk and space  rock edge and the band will never become mainstream. But they tried their hardest here.

The quality is somewhere between decent and good as most of the songs are decent. It is not an album I will remember these legends for.

2.5 points

 

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