Space Needle - The Moray Eels Eats The Space Needle

great great band

Agreed, it made me smile to see this thread revived! I was 14 and just starting to learn about space rock/ambient/drone, so this scratched an itch but also expanded my mind way beyond what I knew. And even just on CD, the Roger Dean artwork absolutely did the trick, it really made it feel like it was coming from another world...at least the epic pieces here did so.

I think at one point I had read it was going to just be the long pieces? (Am I making that up?) But the poppier stuff absolutely makes this a richer experience. I love that "Old Spice" is disintegrating shoegaze with cribbed Steely Dan lyrics (didn't know that at the time, of course) and yes, "Love Left Us Strangers" is pretty perfect...this is the kind of thing that at the time I think some reviewers thought was ironic--maybe understandable in the face of the artwork or some of the song titles, but pretty disarming on its own.

Truthfully, I haven't listened to this or Voyager in a long time, but they're both really special albums. Soft spot in my heart for the first Reservoir and Varnaline albums, too.

A deeply weird record.

I would pick up reissues of these. It took many years of waiting, but I finally found a store selling Moray Eels Eat The Space Needle on discogs for a price that wasn't outrageous. Their 7-inches are all still pretty inexpensive.

Yeah as a 90s underground indie vinyl collector there's a randomness to 7" demand amongst bands. Sometimes the price spikes on particular titles for various incidental "collectible" reasons, other times a mystery (usually just because some nut-job decided they'd pull the trigger on an opportunistic $30 price tag thereby validating the price even though other comparable titles remain cheap), but in general lots of 7"s from the era are still pretty dang affordable despite whatever higher price the LPs are fetching.