https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMqpxHY2nFs
“The 12-inch single version of Big City is the one for me, Spacemen 3 locking things into extended and ethereal trance mode for many long and hypnotic minutes. A driving song, I figure, ideal for being alone in a great big city. Nothing to do but cruise your solitude, bright lights, lots of shadow.” (Philip Random)
“You’ve probably noticed there’s not much stuff from the 1990s on this list even though the cut-off date is officially summertime 2000. That’s because I generally didn’t buy new vinyl past about 1989. Is this fair to the 1990s? No. And I’m sorry about that. This list is not fair. This list is not definitive. Yet it would be a complete farce without stuff from 1991’s zeitgeist bender The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, because I had to have that one on vinyl, all four sides of it, something I could look at BIG and spread out, while it played BIG and spread out, not unlike the entirety of the universe, known and otherwise.” (Philip Random)
“Evol (the name of the album in question) is love spelled backward, which is pretty much what was going on in 1991, Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum, as Sonic Youth warmed up Neil Young + Crazy Horse, choosing not to pander even slightly to all the aging hippies in the house, but rather to deliver unto them a profound and beautiful and sustained NOISE. The climax came with Expressway to Yr Skull, which actually starts out kind of nice, but then ‘We’re Gonna Kill – The California Girls – We’re gonna fire the exploding load in the milkmaid maidenhead.’ The hippies were very confused, angry even, but I just laughed. The times, they just kept a-changing.” (Philip Random)
By the time When Tomorrow Hits hit, Spacemen 3 had already broken up for all the regular reasons that drug addled, pioneering psychedelic outfits break up, and then some. A cover of a Mudhoney original, it was supposed to be part of a double-A split single which would also feature Mudhoney’s version of Spacemen 3’s Revolution, but for whatever hazy reason, that didn’t happen. What does happen is Spacemen 3’s equal parts smoother and sharper take on When Tomorrow Hits, particularly that part when it hits!
“Strong sense of groove and melody, lots of cool, modern dub tricks – The Strange Parcels seemed to have it all when I first heard them back in 1991 care of On-U Sound‘s Pay It All Back Vol.3 (which remains one of the great compilation albums of any era, as do pretty much all the others in the series). But then, that was about it. An album would eventually show up a few years later, but I was onto other things by then, as was the world, I guess. But I did keep going back to Pay It All Back Vol.3 in general, To Be Free in particular, key ingredient in many a mixtape, dragged to many a house party, bonfire, mountaintop. Soundtrack for this slow apocalypse, still ongoing.” (Philip Random)
“In which then still young Neil Young draws the obvious connection as early as 1974 between the vampire’s bloodlust and western man’s need for oil. In other words, we’re junkies, willing to kill for a fix. And kill we mostly blatantly did in 1991. And then again in 2003. No Blood For Oil said all the anti-War posters and placards, but they were missing the point. The oil was blood. It still is. And we’re still killing for it.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 