Friday, November 16, 2001

Music Review
Spiritualized - Let it come down
By Jack Bullion

Jason “Spaceman” Pierce, the frontman and driving force behind British rock band Spiritualized, has always composed material based on three things: Love, God and lots and lots of drugs. While all those exist to fill an aching spiritual, emotional and psychological absence, the latter has been the most exhaustively covered topic in the Spiritualized oeuvre.

This is a man who once declared “Sometimes I have my breakfast right out of a bottle / And sometimes I have it right off of a mirror,” and yet his dreamy, bombastic music somehow lends an odd nobility to the stoner aesthetic.

On “Let It Come Down,” however, Pierce, for the first time, is beginning to show palpable signs of regret and remorse for the aimless, wasted existence he has led. The title is fitting, as the album’s 11 songs present the sound of a junkie on an extended comedown, trying to make up his mind either to kick the habit or keep going. “I’m going nowhere,” he declares mournfully, but then realizes “nowhere’s where I wanna be.”

Spiritualized has always sounded as drugged up as their frontman. No band in the history of rock and roll has embraced the possibilities of feedback the way they have.

Where Spiritualized’s previous two albums, 1997’s “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” and 1998’s magnificent “Live at the Albert Hall,” mixed soaring orchestral flourishes with squawking bursts of (pick one: beautiful or interminable) white noise, “Let It Come Down” comes as a startling departure. Gone are the peals of feedback. In their place is a lavish orchestra; the likes of which hasn’t been heard on a rock album since Brian Wilson was fighting his own demons through the saving power of pop melody.

Pierce, whose singing voice barely gets above monotone, actually sounds monumentally anguished on laments like “Out of Sight” and “The Straight and the Narrow,” showing, at long last, an unwillingness to let the background music pick up the emotional slack for him any longer. But the man can still squeeze out irresistibly gorgeous hooks. “Stop Your Crying,” with its full backing choir, sounds like Paul McCartney on his best day, and “Don’t Just Do Something” might be the most beautiful song recorded by anybody this year. And in case you were wondering if it was all gloomy bluster, Pierce even throws in a little old fashioned hard rock for good measure, on “On Fire,” “The Twelve Steps” and the sublime “Do It All Over Again.”

Like every album Spiritualized has ever made, “Let It Come Down” is a lot to swallow, and can sound either crushingly pretentious or profoundly transcendent from moment to moment. While it might be hard to make sense of it now, this sure sounds like one of those albums that people come back to after about 20 years, and suddenly realize that it’s an absolute classic.

—Jack Bullion