When is a budget-priced quadruple CD package not a budget-priced quadruple CD package? When it's really only three different albums, with the last a cunningly disguised repackaging of the fourth, of course. And while in fairness to the label, the front of the sleeve itself claims only to contain three CDs, which is more likely to be a clerical error than anything else. It's not, after all, as if anybody exactly burst any brain cells putting this thing together.In the world of early-'70s Hawkwind live (or thereabouts) recordings, there are but half a dozen primary sources -- the official Space Ritual double album, the BBC In Concert set, and the Brixton Sundown show (all from 1972), the following year's Wembley Arena show, and two recordings that first began circulating in the early '80s that have since appeared on at least a dozen different albums apiece, all under different titles and many with different details and occasionally with misleading track listings. One is the so-called Text of Festival, a double album first released in 1983; the other, In the Beginning, originally appeared in 1985. And the joke is on the completist collector when he/she discovers that they are precisely the same collection of BBC sessions and unspecified live jamming created when the earlier set was clipped down from two LPs to one CD with a few sharp edits and the excision of the closing jam. But you wouldn't discover that until you got the record home. Or, in this case, the box. While discs two and three represent the Brixton 1972 and Wembley 1973 shows, The Entire & Infinite Universe of Hawkwind then makes the same mistake that several other labels (and, doubtless, thousands of fans) have made in the past, assuming that just because two albums have slightly different track listings they must be slightly different recordings. Wrong. It's a deception that was infuriating enough when the discs were available separately. Bunch them together and it's downright insulting. But, there again, anybody who really does need to take one more spin around the block with these shows is scarcely going to complain at that. All three have been issued and reissued so many times, under so many different titles, that it would probably have been more surprising if they hadn't been grouped together. But still, The Entire & Infinite Universe of Hawkwind is as unnecessary an excuse for a box set as you're likely to find on the record racks, and even its budget price doesn't really excuse its existence. Unless, of course, you can find someone else who wants to buy your copies of the original single albums. ~ Dave Thompson|

Rovi