Spiritualized – Songs in A and E Review
The critical consensus on J. Spacemen aka Jason Pierce aka Spiritualized, is that he reached his creative peak around 1997, with the symphonic-space-rock-blues-opus in pharmaceutical blister packaging, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. It’s been an eleven long years since then, five years since Spiritualized’s last album and nearly six months since Songs in A&E first appeared, heralding a return to form and a well-publicised brush with death.
Pierce’s contracting of periorbital cellulitis with bilateral pneumonia in 2005 has been regularly documented and has coloured most of the assessments of Songs in A&E (meaning Accident and Emergency) despite most of the material being written before Pierce’s three-week stay in intensive care. But for an album dedicated to the hospital that saved his life, includes the sound of a respirator on “Death Take Your Fiddle” and is furnished with eerily prophetic predictions of his illness, such considerations are obvious, but how much has changed to warrant this return to form?
The sole permanence of Jason Pierce in Spiritualized, as the band endured countless line-up changes, has preserved his place as a galvanising musical force but it has also kept his insular technique in focus for a little too long. This one portal and its shtick, of detailing pharmaceutical dependence and an associated desire for spiritual rapture, (that has been repeated for eighteen years) has become tedious in its monotony, despite the transcending quality of listening to someone singing from the squalor of self-medication (imagined or otherwise) as they look to the heavens to contemplate their mortality. Now, after a near death experience and a very real medical dependence, it’s a little too easy to expect that Songs in A&E has a newfound “he means it, man” gravitas, when the initial references to morphine, codeine, and Jesus start to service the here-we-go-again reflex.
Still, there are a few minimal changes to the Spiritualized model. “I Gotta Fire” and “Yeah Yeah” are a little more straight-ahead than expected, and a little too straightforward in their rock-by-numbers delivery, to be coming from someone who used to arrange ambitious psychedelic compositions. A sparser musical method may be warranted when the road to excess clearly doesn’t always lead to the palace of wisdom, but this back-to-basics approach presents a limp rock ‘n’ roll routine instead of a successful paring back of any extraneous sonic indulgencies.
What is significant is the voice, the sleepy slur of old has mutated into a fragile croak and the cracked words and the vocal strains add a lived-in authenticity to the down-tempo musings on vulnerability. This transformed voice charts a larger transformation, from a nebulous one-dimensional preoccupation with God, drugs and love to the consequences of a prolonged exposure to God, drugs and love. Pierce may rarely look beyond himself, but his age-old concerns seem plaintive on Songs in A&E because they sound plaintive, as opposed to being a supplementary consideration of the story of the man behind the artist. Spiritualized may not, after all, be matching the former grandiosity of their past glories or even ruminating on matters beyond the usual pleas for narcotic salvation, but Songs in A&E delivers a soulful voice, back from the dead, with a refined and seemingly haunted sensitivity.
Spiritualized – Death Take Your Fiddle
Spiritualized – Sitting On Fire
Tags: album
