Review Summary: Hawkwind do the bare minimum required for a new album.
Hawkwind – A trip through space, Part XXII, Who needs new material?
The year is 1999 and the people are afraid. They are afraid that the world will spontaneously combust as soon as the clocks strike midnight on December 31st 1999. But even if the world were to suddenly end in a blaze of fiery glory, there would still be Hawkwind. And they would still be releasing albums despite the slump of material production in the late 1990s.
In Your Area is the last album released by Hawkwind in the 1990s, gracing the shelves of music stores in the first few days of that year. It had taken two years to create due to a massive gap in between recording schedules. The first six tracks are live recordings, the last six tracks were made in the studio.
Hawkwind appeared on this album as:
Dave Brock – electric guitar, keyboards, vocals
Jerry Richards – electric guitar
Ron Tree – vocals, bass guitar
Richard Chadwick – drums
Captain Rizz – vocals
Crum (Julian Crimmins) – Keyboards
Hawkwind have always been a formidable force live, and the first half of the album is but a tiny snippet of that force. It has its pros and cons, the opening track 'Brainstorm' is a full of a mash of psychedelic excellence that sounds just as good now as it did thirty years ago. The song flows along into a reggae styled musical track led by Captain Rizz, which provides the unique experience of being one of the few space reggae rock songs in existence, as the track slips back and forth between reggae and space rock.
On the other hand, much of the live material comes from weaker albums, with three of the tracks coming from the Distant Horizons album. But Hawkwind show that playing them live is a whole different matter, pouring tonnes of energy and skill into the tracks. But it appears as though the band literally recorded the songs 'as is', with no studio touch up on any of the work. As such they sound quite muddled and the production on some of the tracks is rather poor.
Despite these issues, the live section of the album is an enjoyable experience. From the blasting space of 'Brainstorm', to the slower and more collected space ballad that is 'Love in Space'. All of this is helped by Captain Rizz adding reggae influences to a band that had already attempted to play every musical genre on the face of the earth. His hard Caribbean style rapping is a nice difference to the rest of the band. However this can occasionally sound repetitive or a little bit out-of-place if reggae is not your thing.
It is not until you reach the last twenty minutes of the album that you actually get some new material from the band, most of which is a let down. The song 'Your Fantasy' sounds eerily similar to 'Love in Space' even sharing a similar piano tune. The only truly stand out track to emerge from the album's second half is the eastern inspired track 'Hippie', which is one of the better Hawkwind tracks to emerge from the band during the 1990s.
This album has problems, and is definitely top-heavy as the music on the live tracks is much better than the studio tracks. Much of the energy that was on the earlier tracks has dissipated and the band sound as if they are performing on auto-pilot. Even the sweet guitar and piano work on the song 'Pairie' can't truly save them, because it is only three minutes long. The final tracks have nothing more to prove as Hawkwind beep and screech their way towards the end of the album in various forms of space sound.
In Your Area only has twenty minutes of new music, and only eight minutes of that is truly worth your time. As such, In Your Area is not a brilliant piece of work from a band that had been going for thirty years. The only true consolation is that the songs 'Hippie' and 'Pairie' are among the best material Hawkwind has ever released. But* their lack of new material in the 90s was really starting to show as the decade neared its end. Hawkwind appeared to have expired everything in their extensive tank of material. Would the new millennium change this? Or would the world explode as the clocks chimed the year to its close?
