(New Album Review) The Soviet Space Programme- Space Is Hell

Space is Hell by The Soviet Space Programme, the brainchild of prolific North English poet and musician Thomas Jude Barclay Morrison, is a conceptual one-off hinged on a ghastly alternate-history– suppose Ivan Ivanovich, the dummy sent into space twice by the Soviet Union about a month before Yuri Gagarin’s historic orbit and the true first “man” in space, was in fact a real man forever expunged from Soviet record. Suppose this real man met a fate not as comfy as that of Ivan and Yuri’s celebrated homecomings…suppose he never came home at all.

All this serves as the launching point for an absolutely blistering hour and fifteen minutes of droning guitar sludge undercut by the eerie whispers of radio chatter slowly slipping into the abyss. As Ivanovich drifts further and further away from his last remaining connection to Earth, the vaccuum overpowers the signal more and more until it eviscerates it altogether. This ingeniously morbid concept album comes highly recommended to all fans of drone doom, fuzz-heavy psychedelia, and noise.