It was only last October when I posted a glowing review of Monster Magnet’s excellent ‘The Last Patrol’ up on these pages, an album that made it into my top ten of 2013 with ease. Now, along with a solid touring schedule, space pilot extraordinary Dave Wyndorf has take the time to remix the album in a thoroughly retro style and re-release it as the epically titled ‘Milking the Stars: a re-imagining of Last Patrol’. Normally I don’t get on with such remixes, after all, if the artist was that unhappy with the original production, why did they release it, and I tend to associate it with pop acts trying to flesh out their back catalogues and squeeze some more money from their mug punters. The last time I personally encountered such activity in the realm of metal was when Prong released ‘Power of the Damn Mixxer’, an album that I felt failed in comparison to the original, in my personal opinion.
So, how does ‘Milking the Stars’ stack up? Well, whilst Tommy Victor changed his material by trying to modernise it with drum machines and samples, Mr Wyndorf has chosen the opposite route, getting in his musical TARDIS, and flying back to the age of psychedelia, where a computer was one of those punch card fed monolithic engines that IBM thought maybe every city “might need”, and recording and mixing music was far more of an art then a science, where RAM was a kind of animal the drummer liked to bed and megabytes were the munchies after some of natures finest herb had been burnt. ‘Let the Circus Burn’ opens the album and drifts out of the speakers on a wave of Hammond organ and electric sitar, the sounds swirling like the gentle smoke of a hookah in an eastern bazaar, trippy instrumental effects that need no sampling or looping starting the aural journey aboard the good ship Monster Magnet. ‘Mindless Ones ’68’ follows, again with a massively strong keyboard presence interweaving the meandering guitar lines; comparisons between the interplay of Robby Krieger and the late lamented Ray Manzarek are inevitable, and meant only in the most complementary of terms. ‘No Paradise For Me’, complete with its dark countrified guitar sounds echoes throughout as if played live in a cavernous hanger with the recording mic far from the players to catch the reverb rather than being machine synthesised, the tone being loose, fuzzy, and hypnotic, bringing to mind a yesteryear where that was how special effects were created.
Every track on the album has been given a retro treatment that screams of authenticity and classic influences: ‘End of Time (B-3) has a stripped down Stooges beat; ‘Milking the Stars’ has the lazy swagger of a Jim Morrison performance piece; ‘Hallelujah’ has become ‘Hallelujah (fuzz and swamp) with the dirty sound of the bayou cranked up far beyond the original, and ‘The Duke of Supernatural’ has morphed into ‘The Duke (Full On Drums ‘N Wah)’ like a magical collaboration between The Byrds and Lynyrd Skynyrd with John Bonham guesting on drums.
With this album or remixes and re-imaginings, Mr Wyndorf may well be ‘Milking the Stars’, but what he is not doing is milking his fans. This album stands on its own merits as much as an accompaniment to the original, and with my tickets already purchased for Monster Magnet’s spring 2015 tour, I’ll be bloody happy whichever arrangement of these tracks is played live. Of course, being the old hippy that I am, if there happens to be a Hammond organ on stage, my grin might well be that little bit wider.
(8.5/10 Spenny)
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