Reviews: Hawkwind, Mars Red Sky & Queen Of The Meadow, Evermore, Ascending Olympus (Reviews By Rich Piva, David Karpel, Zak Skane & Matt Bladen)

Hawkwind - The Future Never Waits (Cherry Red Records) [Rich Piva]

Hawkwind is back with album number 4723 in their vast catalog, The Future Never Waits! I kid, kind of. It is amazing that these guys are still pumping out new albums considering they started as a band in 1969 and have been super influential on any band who is doing any version the space rock out there today. 

But do we really need a new Hawkwind album? Going back to my Overkill review (I am sure there is a connection somewhere…I know! Hawkwind had Lemmy…Lemmy left to form Motorhead…who put out an album called Overkill…hence, six degrees of Hawkwind) am I or any Hawkwind fan ever going to go back to this record and listen to it more than a couple of times? Unlike the new Overkill record, I am going to go with “no”. But that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a solid, late career record that fans of the band will enjoy however many times they spin it.

Right off the bat on The Future Never Waits you get a signature ten-minute instrumental space out jam with the title track. Pops, clicks, asteroids, droid sounds, it’s all there and what you would expect from the band. Hawkwind pick up the pace and rock out on the next track, The End, which is one of their best songs in many years. It’s a kind of raw straight-ahead rocker with all those outer space sounds and a sweet synth solo. 

The Future Never Waits is raw. There is nothing overproduced here, almost to the point that you wonder if they had much of a production budget. This is all a complement by the way. Throughout The Future Never Waits, you osculate between long spacey jams (They Are So Easly Distracted), more space rockers with vocals (Rama, which is a great track) and weird interludes (Aldous Huxley) with, for the most part, very positive results.

I am not saying anything you don’t know if you are familiar with this band, but The Future Never Waits is very long. Seventy minutes tries your attention span. I could see this whittled down to forty-five and being a much more ingestible listen, but hey, if you are here for Hawkwind you already are prepared. I could skip tracks like Aldous Huxley that really act as a five-minute placeholder/interlude that is not necessary.

If you are a Hawkwind fan, you will dig this. The question is for how long? Does this have staying power in an already huge and excellent discography? For me, maybe, but for the Hawkwind diehards it will be interesting to see if The Future Never Waits gets more than one or two nostalgia spins or if this becomes heavy rotation material for the forceable future. I lean towards the former. 7/10

Mars Red Sky & Queen Of The Meadow - Mars Red Sky & Queen Of The Meadow (Mrs Red Sound and Vicious Circle Records) [David Karpel]

Mars Red Sky, a cornerstone of the French stoner rock scene, are back with a three track EP that refreshes everything we know about the band and forces us to look forward with anticipation for more of this. As the EP title suggests, Mars Red Sky & Queen Of The Meadow, these tracks showcase a collaboration. Queen Of The Meadow, an indie folk band, is made up of singer-songwriter Helen Ferguson and Mars Red Sky vocalist Julien Pras. Their voices–individually or harmonized–combine hypnotically with the deep, slow, and low, fuzzy riffing of Pras on guitars and bassist Jimmy Kinast. 

They world-build a fantastical landscape of madness Matgaz makes mountainous with his heavy hitting drums. The first song, Maps Of Inferno, is a seven minute monster of a track. (The third song on this EP is a shortened version of the first.) Pras has always had a captivating, almost at times ethereal voice. The addition of Ferguson adds a dimension to Mars Red Sky that reveals new possibilities of melody and psychedelica. The mix is gloriously awash in fuzz while amazingly pristine with clarity. That saturation mixed with clarity continues in the second track, Out At Large, a song that captures a head caressing melody over deep water hooks. 

The songwriting, production, the mastering, the mix, everything is working at newer and better levels for these guys. Mars Red Sky is adept at creating walls of tremendous riffs with opiate grooves. In that way, these songs fit neatly into their catalog, and for my ears, at the top. These tracks push them forward. In these huge sounding songs, in the midst of the maelstrom, Ferguson and Pras help the band take flight into a new world of heavy, psychedelic dark folk. We hope they keep flying. 8/10

Evermore – In Memoriam (Scarlet Records) [Zak Skane]

Once the harmonious introduction of Nova Aurora subsides with its pulsing string sections up upbeat choirs and rumbling timpani sections we are greeted with high speed introduction of Forevermore. Shrouds of thick powerchords cloud our sky whilst being accompanied by soaring pedal tone riffs before we get charged by thunderous fast double kick action. The singer serenades us with magical tales through his powerful high operatic vocals. 

Through the open track we are blazed with soaring leads and epic harmonise charging alongside the thunderous rhythm sections. The thunderous rhythms continue to rage on in Nightfire in the form of 8th note triplets kick patterns and the guitars striding back to give us punching pounding galloping rhythms to help us march to victory. I Am The Flame gets to see the band to their full capabilities with dragon force levels of speed running guitar parts, rock god levels of drum fills that would make you air drum for hours but still having the talent and dynamics to step away to allow the vocals to have their moments in the song. 

When you start to the think that I Am The Flame what the band at their peak then you are wrong. Tracks like Empire Within still keep the momentum with it’s galloping rhythmned verses and the immersive wall of strings and synths, whilst Broken Free displays another peak of the bands with the track going from loudest of dynamics with the triumphant orchestration of chugging guitars and cinematic orchestration to the quite acoustic sections to serenade us to sleep. 

Finally the last highlight I want to pick up on this album is the moving title track In Memoriam which captures the album to it’s full potential, from the moving lyrics of topics such as moving on from losing a loved one, to the riffs being just as melodic as well as being executed at breakneck speed whilst also having it’s moving quiet passages.

I usually find power metal quite cheesy and over the top, but Evermore alongside bands like Orden Ogan have regained my trust in the sub-genre. From the bombastic symphonic section of their Nova Aurora to their title track In Memoriam this band knows how to move and exite the most hard to win audience of the genre. For fans of Iron Maiden and Orden Ogan. 8/10.

Ascending Olympus - Frontiers (Drakkar Productions) [Matt Bladen]

Death metal from Greece now as Ascending Olympus, climb that legendary mountain with intent to conquer the death metal realm with this debut. Combining brutal death with old school thrash Frontlines gets it's licks in early with the first blast of As The Ground Trembles, the thing that hits you first being the meaty bass of Ioannis Dres, taking the role of the main rhythm section it's thick and fattening against the treblely drumming of Jim Rouvell on Off To Different Shores especially.

The rhythm section and the grizzled vocals of Andreas Lohiotatos immediately making think of Bolt Thrower, while the guitars of Costas Papadopoulos are quite varied and impressive with more than a touch of Coroner. The epic themes of Greek history inspire the lyrics of these 10 tracks across 40-something minutes the tone changing on Hell Is In My Eyes, the thrashier style of A Call To Arms, which features Mario's Dupont of Lucifer's Call on vocals while Death Will Come getting into more modern death realms as does I Of The Damantion.

Grunting, grooving death metal, Frontiers is a definitive first statement from Ascending Olympus, get those pits going. 8/10