Hovercraft’s ‘Blown Away’ is a resurrection with teeth. It arrives like a message from a vanished decade, carrying the pulse of a songwriter who lit himself on fire just to see what burned brightest. The story behind it is already the stuff of music folklore: songs written by Piers “Charlie Pepper” Wildman in 1996, abandoned when he disappeared, then exhumed nearly 30 years later from warped cassettes and ghosts of scribbled lyrics. But what’s remarkable is how alive this record feels.
The trilogy leading up to it flirted with reinvention, transforming Charlie’s sketches into neo-soul, jazz, atmospheric experimentation. ‘Blown Away’ is the opposite as it delivers a return to the blast radius. These thirteen tracks roar with the youthful volatility that first defined the band, but sharpened through restoration rather than revision. Imagine punk-blueprints and scrappy alt-rock skeletons held up to the light, leaving their imperfections deliberately preserved.
‘New Pine Overcoat’ stands out as a highlight, all jangly, urgent, and barbed with a melody that feels both reckless and tender. While ‘Angel’ feels like a bruise forming in slow motion, all wiry guitar tension and vocal delivery that strains beautifully against its own vulnerability. But the emotional apex comes with the sprawling two-part ‘Now You’re God / Dying Comes So Easy’. It’s Charlie’s opus, and you can feel it as it unveils a fever dream of defiance and collapse, swinging between whispered resignation and blistering catharsis. This is the kind of track bands spend their whole careers chasing.
What’s startling is how seamless the album feels despite its fractured origins. Songs recovered from decaying tape shouldn’t sound this alive, this coherent, and this wired. The restoration process has created a record that feels both archival and startlingly new. The jagged guitars hit with 90s grit but the mix gives them a modern physicality; the lyrics swing between confessional and cryptic, and the vocals land with the urgency of someone who didn’t expect anyone to actually hear these songs again.
Hovercraft channel the voltage of bands who turned emotional disarray into anthems, but the identity here is unmistakably their own, shaped by absence, rediscovery, and myth-making.
By the closing notes of ‘Concrete Hill’, the project delivers the completion of a circle that was violently broken in 1996. It’s a band finishing a conversation that their songwriter never got the chance to. It’s a document of what was, what remains, and what refuses to stay buried.
‘Blown Away’ is a triumph of raw artistry, devotion, and musical archaeology. It’s the kind of record that haunts you because of how powerfully it speaks.
