Space Ritual: Collector's Edition

Crucial reissue from a band whose disorienting electronic drones and motorik rhythms were akin to their Krautrock contemporaries, but who also could make a racket as unrelentingly punchy and violent as anything from the Stooges' Fun House.

It's been said that the span between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars was science fiction's downer period, with the grim silliness of TV shows like Space: 1999 and dystopian unhappy-ending movies like Soylent Green and The Omega Man dampening the optimism of NASA's space exploration with constant warnings of a gloomy future and post-apocalyptic isolation. But it was a golden age for sci-fi in pop music: Between the unbridled creativity of Sun Ra's Philadelphia years, the development of Parliament's intergalactic mythos, and David Bowie being David Bowie,and sometime collaborator Michael Moorcock, and typically themed around interstellar travel, metaphysics and Pythagoras' theory of celestial-mathematical "music of the spheres."

If this all seems a bit dense and weird and impenetrable, rest assured that Hawkwind's arcanum isn't too difficult to get caught up in, especially via their circa-1972 lineup-- which delivered plenty of straightforward rock riffage amidst all the special effects and featured, amongst the aforementioned personnel, a former rhythm guitarist turned bassist named Lemmy Kilmister. Space Ritual, recorded over two separate concert dates in London and Liverpool in December 1972, is a solid effort at capturing what made Hawkwind a cult favorite, and the Collector's Edition pads it out just enough to keep things from being too overwhelming. The set has been expanded from its original "88