There may have never been a better 1-2 punch than Sonic Boom and J Spaceman. What they created together defies categorization and stands up as truly timeless. They wore their influences on their sleeves no question; Velvet Underground, Suicide, Doors, gospel, drugs, tremolo, and they mixed it all up and out came this blissed out bit of troubled brilliance that left us in the end with a catalog full of slow burning hazy classics.
Choosing a smoked beer as the perfect companion to Spacemen 3 is kind of obvious, there has never been any question about the drug use of the band, and through a staggering use of an array of effects everything they did had this feel of being enveloped in this thick smoke, where everything slows down and is all pitch bends and technicolor.
So why a porter vice something like a smoked lager? Simple, I am of the opinion that no style of beer says rock and roll like a porter does. That jet black pour like dark sunglasses, that dirty-peaty taste is perfect for layers of gritty distortion and fuzz, the chocolate matching the sexed up overdrive, coffee for the comedown, big ABV because if you're going to do it you might as well as do it up proper, but when a porter or a great psych band hits just right, as this offering from Left Hand does and everything from Spacemen 3 did, it can also be so sweet and fucking smooth.
Every Spacemen 3 record deserves to be played at a pretty decent volume, as such any beer has to match that volume, it needs to be full of big flavors. With Smoke Jumper you get that huge roasty flavor and loads of big smoke, coffee, caramel, brownies even (making it even more fitting). But in spite of being fuzzed out and all rock, there was never a real rush to get anywhere with a Spacemen record, everything just rolled along and got where it was going whenever it got there. That makes this beer even more perfect for them as I can pour a tulip of this and just sip away for 45 minutes or so, just building my buzz slowly but very surely (at 9+% this will do some damage).
It's unfortunate that we will never see a Spacemen reunion, Jason just isn't going to have it. But their legacy and influence is stunning. From the post-rock blitz that occurred the latter part of the 90s into the early part of this millennium, to the blissed out drones of Emeralds, and the stunning minimal guitar work of guys like William Fowler Collins, they have reached across the spectrum of artists making challenging, exciting, music for over twenty years now and their influence continues to grow as people go in reverse from Spiritualized and Sonic Boom's solo projects and find themselves rediscovering this band. Similarly, I expect at some point in the near future we will see the porter explode within the craft beer market. The IPA and APA have been just about hopped to death, stouts have been pushed to crazy limits the past few years, but the porter has continued to not get the respect it deserves, it has kind of sat on the shelf and largely been ignored. When that time comes I am pretty sure Smoke Jumper will hold up as a gold standard and many of the flavors and the balance found here will be touched on by other brewers trying to create black gold.
I started this by stating that there may have never been a better 1-2 punch than Sonic Boom and J Spaceman. Sure there are a lot of contenders there; Marr and Morrisey, Yorke and J Greenwood, Lee and Thurston, Kim Deal and Frank Black, Dre and Snoop, the list could go on forever, and I won't deny that anyone can make a legitimate case for any of those and many others. But for me, Spacemen 3 have always touched a certain nerve that no other band can. I don't really know what it is, it's kind of like that feeling of sitting on your couch across the room from your wife but you're not really engaged with her. She is reading and you are working out a new synth patch but there's comfort and warmth in knowing she is still there. That strange but wonderful feeling of being completely alone in the loving company of someone else...that is Spacemen 3 for me, and nothing goes better with that feeling than this jet black pour of a damn near perfect beer; sweet, warming, heady...just bliss.
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