Blown Away by hovercraft: Album Review

by admin December 13, 2025

December 13, 2025

Hovercraft closes the curtain on its Bond-themed resurrection trilogy with Blown Away, a gripping and unfiltered finale built from the surviving fragments of Charlie “Pepper” Wildman’s earliest songwriting. Unlike the polished reinterpretations on Shaken Not Stirred and On the Rocks, this release digs straight into the cardboard-box archive, with songs found on brittle cassettes, warped four-tracks, and handwritten notes from 1995–96, as a preservation act and a distress signal, with thirteen volatile transmissions sent into the dark in hopes Charlie might still hear them.

The album blasts off with “Indie Kid,” a punch-to-the-chest opener driven by buzzing guitars and fast, thumping drums. The lead vocalist’s high grain slices through the chaos, singing with tense, sharp urgency, the youth-vs-world anthem Charlie likely wrote before he even realized he’d become part of that world’s debris.

Then “These Days” arrives sounding like something salvaged from a dream, with its origin story already haunted, resurrected from leftover analog tapes running backwards and at half-speed. The band gives it its original jam-band urgency, like a memory speeding up to outrun itself.

But the emotional core reveals itself in “Angel.” Opening with delicate acoustic chords, it has a touching, tender vocal so close you can hear every breath. A soft piano joins, lifting her emotional, hearty voice for the person who felt like salvation, only now drifting further away. Midway, shimmering percussion and thudding drums pull it skyward. And the heartbreak suddenly transforms into biting defiance. She slams the door shut with the line, “I am gonna screw all your friends,” making you gasp, because you were not expecting that.

Later, “New Pine Overcoat” swaps the celebration of youth for stark fatalism. The vocal turns dry and low-toned while the drums rustle underneath. She sings, “If you kill yourself, please send me a note…,” bringing morbid humor to mask a wound that clearly never healed.

Closer “Concrete Hill” bursts open with alt-dance catharsis, turning grief into a shout-along. It’s the raw ancestor of “Higher Ground,” and it lets the record exit not with silence but with sparks.

Blown Away is a messy and vulnerable final flare shot into the void for a friend who vanished, to venerate the throbbing heartbeat of art left unfinished.