Album Review: Spiritualized Heal On Songs In A&E

Jason Pierce and his band Spiritualized blew most British bands off the stage with the 1997 epic Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, a masterfully lush, orchestrated mix of gospel, rock, and Brit pop. One wondered whether the chemical indulgences so explicitly discussed in Pierce's songs would ever lead to diminishing returns, and that seemed to be the case on follow-ups Let It Come Down and Amazing Grace: both had their moments, but neither felt like a cohesive whole. Oddly enough, the onset of a near-fatal bout of double pneumonia for Pierce in 2005 seems to have refocused Spiritualized to the themes of pain, escape, love, and redemption that made their material so compelling to begin with.

After the drug-rock grandeur of previous outings, there's a tonality on Songs in A&E that is surprising: sometimes you feel as if Lambchop or Calexico have crashed Pierce's recording session. Fortunately, these pieces are agile and beautiful, not ham-handed or self-conscious. The band haven't lost their penchant for widescreen-style arrangements with horns and strings; rather, it just sounds like they've been listening to some Americana music of late. The long instrumental passages from other records are also curtailed, split instead into six brief song connectors titled "Harmony 1-6" that accent the beauty of the surrounding pieces. The lyrics don't really veer too far away from Spiritualized's past - the burden of life, the power of love, the wonders of escape, and the wish for something better seem to cover the imagery here pretty soundly. In sum, while Pierce isn't really trying to re-invent himself, he does seem to be maturing and downscaling in a way that feels both proper and enlightening. Spiritualized may just do one thing well, but they've sure got it figured out.

Spiritualized will play the Austin City Limits Festival at Zilker Park on September 27th.