The continued existence of Hawkwind and their myriad offshoots suggests that Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory had its flaws.
Having re-entered the fray in 2009, the follow-up to 2012’s We Are One album finds Harvey’s Bainbridge’s frazzled outfit still hurtling down the kind of sonic wormhole modern-day psych-outfits such as Temples and Tame Impala wouldn’t dare to enter.
‘Deep in space there is no shelter,’ hollers frontman Ron Tree in punk-prog mash-up Blink Of An Eye, and, backed by the turbo-trance rhythms of Bainbridge’s synths and Jerry Richards’s needling guitar lines, this veteran wrecking crew achieve a heaviosity few could match.
Non-believers may wince at the cosmic babble of The Joker, where Tree adopts a Lydon-esque solemnity to declare: ‘I am the toad in a hole.’ But as mind-boggling nine-minute finale Shadow Of The Machines proves, The Hawklords’ refusal to bow down to conventional reality makes them both unique and as up-to-date as tomorrow.
