Hawkwind: Future Reconstructions - Ritual of the Solstice

AMG Review of Hawkwind: Future Reconstructions - Ritual of the Solstice

Dave Thompson
All Music Guide

A relic of that moment in time when no-name remixes of big-name classics seemed somehow to be pushing forward the frontiers of music, Future Reconstructions -- Ritual of the Solstice is a two-CD collection in which -- you guessed it. Fans of Astralasia and Utah Saints will not be disappointed -- both turn in some excellent revisions of, respectively, "Assassin," "Spirit of the Age," and "Uncle Sam's on Mars"; and "Silver Machine." And elsewhere, too, there's some genuinely interesting work being carried out on "Sonic Destruction" (the Advent, "You Shouldn't Do That" Translucent, and "Sonic Attack" (Knights of the Occasional Table. But that's all it is -- "interesting"; little here bears more than a couple of listens, and really, if you want to hear "Master of the Universe" (or most of the other tracks on board), umpteen decades of Hawkwind themselves have already pushed the song to the sonic limit. Do we really need to hear someone else doing it? It's a good club mix, of course, and it certainly reminds of just how prominent a place Hawkwind occupy in the annals of modern electronic dance music. But, like so many other albums of its ilk, ultimately Future Reconstructions is now so locked into the past that you feel old simply listening to it.