Hype: Songs of Tom Mahler

Released to accompany one of the best rock novels of all time, former Hawkwind vocalist Calvert's Hype is part concept album, part soundtrack, and wholly the most underrated project Calvert was ever involved in. The novel, also titled Hype, follows the short career of Tom Mahler, a rising rock star whose career is marked by one of the most ambitious media hypes of all time -- and ended by the greatest masterstroke of all, a bullet in the head on the eve of his breakthrough. The album, then, draws from Mahler's own catalog of songs, a dozen punchy, electronics-driven vignettes with titles like "Hanging out on the Seafront," "The Luminous Green Glow of the Dials of the Dashboard (At Night)," and "Lord of the Hornets," a single and the best-known track on the album, courtesy of its appearances on sundry compilation albums. Of course, all 12 are unmistakably Calvert, caught midway between the quirky pop transmutation of the late-'70s Hawkwind/Hawklords freakshow, and the dense subversive soundscapes of his own next album, Freq. The supporting cast, too, offers few surprises; Simon House, Nik Turner, and Michael Moorcock are all familiar Hawkfriends, and their accompaniment molds itself seamlessly around Calvert's characteristically vivacious lyrics. So seamlessly that Hype's overall obscurity is utterly baffling. Or maybe it isn't. It is fashionable, even among Calvert's greatest admirers, to speak glowingly only of his first two solo sets and to overlook the remainder as mere works in progress -- a conspiracy aided by the unknown record labels, zero budgets, and failing health which dogged his final years. In fact, Hype is at least as striking as Lockheed and Lief -- more so, in fact, when one considers that neither of those albums led anybody anywhere. Play Hype, however, and one can hear the entire course of British synth pop unfolding months before many of its own sainted progenitors themselves got started. And it doesn't even matter whether Calvert was plundered or prescient. You'll never hear Midge Ure and Ultravox in the same light again. ~ Dave Thompson|