I guess it's hard to know what to make of Spectrum's Forever Alien. Sonic Boom's taken quite a fall from his early days with Spacemen 3; instead of taking drugs to make music to take drugs to, it's like he's making music to buy drugs to make music to.

Regardless, there are more than a couple instances of excellent psychedelia to soundtrack your own habits. The opener, "Feels Like I'm Slipping Away," is a creepy space anthem that sounds like the theme music to a posthumous William S. Burroughs documentary. "Delia Derbyshire" is like a rabid Nintendo stuck in "final boss" mode, and "Matrix" is the wormhole to your soul on fast-forward.

If you could eliminate the vocals on Forever Alien's title track (terrible poetry spoken melodramatically in monotone -- "Sometimes I think... I wasn't made for this life..."), "Like..." and "The New Atlantis," even those would be decent songs. Musically, Forever Alien does some original things with electronic music; it's the spoken lyrics and rotten poetry that bring the album down.

-Ryan Schreiber