“Space Ship”
by Sky Sunlight Saxon
2005 song
Sky Saxon often saved the last track on his many albums to do something different, to offer a musical left turn that stood in contrast to the preceding album. Well, "Space Ship" is the last song on 2005’s Transparency and things are a little different here.
The elegiac "Walk Along" comes just before "Space Ship" and sounds far more like a Sky Saxon last-track. "Space Ship" spoils the effect completely: it’s a spacey psych jam, the longest track on the CD, with Sky rambling angrily. He bounces back and forth between themes of Biblical devastation and space travel, and his disturbing rants give rise to great unintentionally comical lines like:
Is it a plane? Is it a bird?
Is it a flock of seagulls?
In this sense "Space Ship" is more like a bonus track, although it isn’t. Where Sky softened the feel of Red Planet with the epic, acoustic guitar-led "Coming Home", or 1994’s Down The Nile album with “Peace, Love & Flowers”, or debut LP The Seeds with the showbizzy "Fallin' In Love", on Transparency he jerks the mood back from "Walk Along" to his own lysergic stratosphere. At the age of 67 he seemed to be telling everyone, “You know what? Psychedelic garage rock is really where it’s at.”
"Space Ship" is a wild and crazy way to end the album, with its crashing thunder drums, Sterling Roswell’s unnerving slide guitar, and its sci-fi keyboard effects. It’s the sound of true believers, led by the truest believer of them all – just listen to the conviction in that exhausted voice.
Note: In the early 1990s Sky Saxon had a project called Spaceship, apparently a band name whose work has not as of this writing been released. This is unrelated to the song "Space Ship".
