Love of Hawkwind music was both lonely as a cloud and beautiful as spring flowers back in the days of my personal underground. As one of their Canadian fans who discovered them via the written works of Moorcock, I had a limited sense of their context or ouevre - moving from new-wavey Calvert works (Quark, Strangeness, and Charm) to crashing howling mindblowing stuff (Doremi Fasol Latido) - but only ever reading about some of their doings, and that in cryptic bits and pieces. And everybody I knew who had any bedrock sense was getting into punk, maybe new wave at this time, so my discovery of a wonderful band from an earlier era was suspect to say the least. Listening to this CD of their 1970s singles now, over a quarter-century later, is revelatory. Some of these songs just aren't on any of their studio albums from that era (Urban Guerilla, Motorhead, It's So Easy), others appear only in more extended versions that may be great but lose something of the original craftsmanship along the way. Here is a concentrated feast of pure acid rock or whatever Hawkwind music is (kinda genre-defying, ya know?). Can't stop listening to it - or marveling at the realization that this is the link between the earlier British Invasion sound and the later punk revolution. Yes, there was an underground rock scene in London in the early 1970s and it was vital & evolving. Okay, that isn't news in London, but it is in Canada, where we languished for lack of this rich sustenance.
Although it is not necessarily the most essential Hawkwind package you will ever be offered, Sonic Boom Killers is, nevertheless, among the most sensibly structured, its 18 tracks offering up most (but not quite all) of the band's 1970s singles -- most of which were released at a time when chart success was a very real possibility, a point proven by the opening salvo of "Silver Machine" (a U.K. number two in 1972) and "Urban Guerilla" (number 39 in 1973). That the band did not otherwise especially bother the Top 75 is simply a sorry quirk of fashion -- "Hurry on Sundown" (from 1970), "Psychedelic Warlords" (1974), "Kings of Speed" (1975), "Quark Strangeness and Charm" (1977), and "Who's Gonna Win the War" (1980) all received a modicum of broadcast support, while "Shot Down in the Night" (1980) scratched to number 59 purely on the back of Hawkwind's adoption by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Four singles are absent from this roundup: "Kerb Crawler", "Back on the Streets", and the alter ego Hawklords' "Psi Power" and "25 Years". In their stead, you receive the Germany-only "Lord of Light". The real meat, however, lies in the gathering together of some key material originally available only as B-sides to the above: the excellent "Seven by Seven", "Brainbox Pollution", 1974's live "It's So Easy", and Lemmy's self-fulfilling prophecy, "Motorhead". All have long since been compiled onto other CDs, of course, but their availability on a single disc is certainly cause for celebration.
Tracklist:
01. Silver Machine
02. Urban Guerilla
03. Hurry On Sundown
04. Kings Of Speed
05. Lord Of Light
06. You Better Believe It
07. Paradox
08. The Psychedelic Warlords
09. Who's Gonna Win The War
10. Motorhead
11. Seven By Seven
12. Brainbox Pollution
13. Born To Go
14. It's So Easy
15. Quark Strangeness And Charme
16. Forge Of Vulcan
17. Shot Down In The Night
18. Urban Guerilla (live)
Original Release Date: 1998
Release Date: August 23, 2005
Label: Repertoire Records (UK)
lossless
http://rapidshare.com/files/68668496/HW188SAB929P.part1.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/68673743/HW188SAB929P.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/68675440/HW188SAB929P.part5.rar
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lossy.mp3
http://rapidshare.com/files/68664634/HW188SAB20G.part1.rar
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Thanks to Rehabilly!
