Spaceseed - The Empire of Night
(Zeta Reticui Records)
Spaceseed - The Empire of Night
(Zeta Reticui Records)
Spaceseed was started back in 1998. It is lead by guitarist John Pack and bassist Brian Fowler. He and his band mates have often hooked up to play with or support Nik Turner and Harvey Bainbridge on various US tours. This CD features Harvey quite prominently. There are also quite a lot of other special guests as well. Anyway, this is a very special 9 track CD. It is not always space rock but more like space collages with different male and female spoken word pieces. Clouds over Titan is different though as it rocks out and features saxophone (which is actually on 5 of the 9 tracks). This piece is instrumental and John lays down a very cool psychedelic guitar solo as well. Office Colony is a interesting spacey spoken word ambient thing. I love the sax on this one. Weird track. Delphi starts with some sax and features John Stanton on guitar as a guest. A crazy jazz like starting with wild electronics, sax and crashing sounds and chaos but it sorts itself out with the guitar riff taking the track up to the next level and then Harvey steps in with some spoken word material. He has a very special voice which is really nice. The track comes back to rock out at the end with some crunchy guitar and a wicked but short solo. A Chance Encounter is a short rock track with a phased out guitar and strange mix and a long sax solo. Wasted Skies ends the CD and it starts slowly and spaced out with Harvey as the vocalist. This is pretty cool and original material. My only complaint is I really don’t like the sound production on many of the tracks. You can hear it was done in different places. Drum sound is really not good at all at times but it is never really that dominant so just hook your ears into the rest and don’t mind me.
Check out the band web site at: http://www.myspace.com/spaceseed1
Reviewed by Scott Heller