Hawkwind Marathon: All Aboard the Skylark (2019)
Another Hawkwind album has been ranked, that album being All Aboard the Skylark, released in 2019. It would get a rating of 9.7/10, which makes it a 10.
This album is the fourth album I listened to from Hawkwind's Modern Era (2016-now), alongside The Machine Stops (2016), Into the Woods (2017) and The Future Never Waits (2023) and I can confidently say that it did surprise me. Although The Future Never Waits is an album that I'll have to re-rank considering I hadn't listened to it in a long time, I had this belief that Into the Woods was the peak of Hawkwind's modern era and based on my experience with Future Never Waits and The Machine Stops, I thought that every other album from that era would be... pretty subpar.
However, listening to this album, I was gladly proven wrong. Not only is All Aboard the Skylark a REALLY good album, but it would actually take away that position of the modern era's peak from Into the Woods. And I think there was a very interesting element that made me like AAtS so much. That would be how Hawkwind approaches electronic music on this album.
If you are a little bit familiar with Hawkwind, you know that despite being formed based on a mutual interest for electronic music, the electronic music that they actually make is a pretty mixed bag. It's either just sitting there idly in the background being drowned out by overdriven guitars like on Levitation (1980) or it's some of the worst music to ever come out from the band, as seen with White Zone (1995). However, All Aboard the Skylark manages to balance things out by making actually good electronic music, which can be seen on tracks like "We Are Not Dead... Only Sleeping" or "65 Million Years Ago".
All in all, I see All Aboard the Skylark as a really fucking good synthesis of their older and more raw space rock sound, reminiscent of Doremi Fasol Latido (1972) or Warrior on the Edge of Time (1975) and their electronic sound of the 80s to 00s. It's not like a weird mixture where all the elements are just floating around in a petri dish, like with The Machine Stops (2016), it's actually chemically bonded together like a compound.
(Additional: You may have also noticed that some albums on the list have been highlighted, these are for albums that need to be re-listened to)