SPACEMEN 3 - SOUND OF CONFUSION

Released: 22/03/24 (delayed from 02/02/24)

The first LP to be released as part of Fire Records’ comprehensive Spacemen 3 reissue list, Sound of Confusion, from 1986, is the still-astounding debut album by the duo of Peter Kember and Jason Pierce, better known to avowed psychonauts everywhere as Sonic Boom and J Spaceman. While for many Spacemen 3 fans the zenith is the trippy-as-all-fuck 1991 LP Recurring, which sounds like a record Suicide would have made if they’d lived on Alice Coltrane’s ashram instead of the Lower East Side, for fans, like me, who like their guitars blown-out and their drums primevally heavy, Sound of Confusion is the one. 

As so while on the LP, as all other Spacemen 3 albums, the prevailing attitude is that three chords is certainly better than four, but two is the sweet spot thank you very much, the debut finds Kember and Pierce at their heaviest, channeling their obvious love of MC5, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and the daddy of them all, Link Wray. Simply put, it is the profane to Recurring’s search for the sacred, and one of the best British acid-rock albums of all time.