Friends & Relations: The Best Of Hawkwind CD - Import

Drawn from the three vinyl volumes of Friends & Relations, this CD collection rounds up 16 of the original 24 songs and, while one can certainly question the decision that saw Robert Calvert's "Widow Song" and Nik Turner's "Man with the Golden Arm" numbered among the absentees, still the collection was far-reaching enough to satisfy most tastes. As expected, the highlights are those delivered by the artists closest to Hawkwind -- saxophonist Nik Turner's Inner City Unit turn in the tremendous "Raj Neesh," Dave Brock delivers "Motherless Children," while five tracks are by Hawkwind themselves. As with so much else in the Hawkwind archive, subsequent reissues and compilations have taken something of the magic away from this collection. Anybody uncertain about entering the world of Friends & Relations, however, will find more than enough to be thinking about here. ~ Dave Thompson

Yet another of the albums drawn from the stash of Hawkwind outtakes and live cuts first accumulated for the Acid Daze box set; and another that has apparently been compiled with no regard whatsoever for the music itself -- beyond, perhaps, an eye for some of the better-sounding material in the original cache. The 1972 Sundown cuts, the 1971 BBC sessions, and even some of the mid- to late-'70s tracks are, at least in the world of Hawkwind oddities, eminently listenable, and one should never get bored listening to Dave Brock gallantly strain his way through Lemmy's "Motorhead."

No, the problem with this collection -- as with the myriad others born of the same low-rent parentage -- is: why do labels even bother? If you're already a Hawkwind fan, you know precisely what it is (fact: never trust an album that includes "Hash Cake 77"); if you're not, you won't care. And if you're undecided, there are around 200 Hawkwind LPs and CDs out there already. What are the odds on you picking up this one? (Er...around 200 to 1, actually.) ~ Dave Thompson

An intriguing addition to the Friends and Relations series, The Rarities is, in fact, an assemblage drawn more or less equally from the original album releases, plus a vault full of further material that never made it onto the LPs themselves. This includes additional material by the unrelated (but certainly not uninfluenced) Underground Zero alongside guitarist Huw Lloyd Langton's eponymous solo band, Michael Moorcock's intriguing "Brothel in Rosenstrasse," and Inner City Unit's statement of intent, "I.C.U." Included, too, are several of the numbers omitted from the earlier Best of Friends & Relations album, including Robert Calvert's "Work Song" and Nik Turner's "Phone Home Elliot" (but still no "Man With the Golden Arm") -- although a couple of songs duplicated from that set do suggest Rarities was not the most carefully compiled album in the Hawkwind back catalog. Ultimately, the usefulness of this album (as with all the other Friends and Relations discs) precisely depends on how deeply the listener needs to delve into the tangled world of Hawkwind. The mothership, after all, has sufficient avenues and alleyways in its own right. Anagram. 2003.