Ah, those halcyon days - CHROME - those cheapo record sleeves with (mostly) crap montages on the front. And the music - the drums never really stepping out of 4:4, but who cared, these guys came from another planet! MICK HARRIS was 'round here when I was playing this and he loved it and couldn't see why I didn't. I guess judging it on it's own merits, it's a pretty good album - fast and thrashy in parts, clean, as shiny as chrome, with most of the mysterious stuff done in what I assume was a clinically sterile studio - okay, so the elements we loved about these guys (I include the late, great DAMON EDGE in that statement) are present, but you have to search for them, and the pristine production (which you just know was roughed up by the producer) is somehow not CHROME - gone is the dusty, smelly Electroharmonics gear they had, all burning wires and valves. "Hyperventilation" has a similar approach to the old sound, but comes off sounding more like SWELL MAPS (which in any other group would be a commendation) - post-Punk, very American Rock, with saxophones adding less than they do to your average Rock 'n' Roll band. "Alien Lady" too has the old lumbering tempo we know and love, and clean as it is, has at least enough weirdness to please us die hard fans. Deep growls and guitar with heaps of flange and filtering at the end saves "Late Bloomer" from being a totally tedious piece of Prog which actually sounds arthritic. "Lactating Purple" takes you back, albeit briefly to "Blood On The Moon" days, when they were good, but beginning to lose momentum. Loadsa heavy fx make it sufficiently weird. And the last two tracks, as sprawling and Proggy as they are, take us back, in many ways, to "Alien Soundtracks", an earlier, confounding time.But, somehow, if CREED has finally rid his (and thus, our) world of Zombies. Aliens and Park-residing Pygmies, he has left the world with less mystery, where shadows are just shadows, and the dead stay dead, both physically and spiritually. He has very much a CLEOPATRA sound now (I believe NIK TURNER has since worked with him - no surprises there) and could interchange this for the afforementioned former HAWKWIND member, PRESSUREHED or any number of others. "This Is The New Age?" yeah, but then THE JAM said "This Is The Modern World" nearly 25 years ago. Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.