Spiritualized
Songs in A&E

June 16, 1997 is a fascinating date in musical history. At the surface, it goes down in the books most famously as the day the Oxfordshire quintet Radiohead issued their third album, OK Computer. OK Computer was a sprawling concept album plumbing isolation and dystopic lows through Thom Yorke’s meditations on modern disdain,which still reached highs of sonically blissful vistas and sweeping guitar panoramas.

There was another record issued the same day that went even higher. It floated in space. From just an English county over in Warwickshire came Jason (J. Spaceman) Pierce and his band Spiritualized with his third album: Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. There never really was meant to be a competition between these records. In fact, Radiohead—the commercially bigger of the two bands—brought Spiritualized out on tour to support them that summer, bringing Pierce and his record in before an audience that would have a shot at “getting” and appreciating the depth and grandiosity of the work.

Still, OK Computer has gone down as a touchstone—a perfect crossroads where traditional guitar-based alt.rock veered into ambient soundscapes, densely orchestrated abstraction, and textured breakbeats—and elevated Radiohead to reluctant rock royalty. Pierce, meanwhile, created an even darker, more personal song cycle of pain, desperation, love loss, chemical haze, and salvation that managed to cross as many lines and blur as many boundaries, stylistically pastiching even broader sounds from avant jazz and gospel to droney psych and Dr. John’s blackened swamp blues. Ladies and Gentlemen has always been forced to play second fiddle to OK Computer, but which was really the best album that came out on that day back in 1997?

Well…flash forward about 11 years. These two bands will always be linked for a handful of reasons—geography, their groundbreaking ways—and now they have both released albums that trade in similar themes: fear, isolation, and preoccupation with death’s creeping specter. Eight months ago, Radiohead issued In Rainbows. Spiritualized, however, have once again made the album that can’t help but be more direct, personal, and arguably better.

Pierce went from offering his vision at a landmark live concert at Royal Albert Hall to the accident and emergency ward of the Royal London Hospital, the place from which the album Songs in A&E takes its title. There, Pierce stood at death’s door with infections that threatened to shut down his respiratory system. Over the month spent in hospital, he was able to finish writing what he had started, and what he lived through tonally change the proceedings of the album. Stretched around and between six separate pieces titled “Harmony,” which serve to act as chapterstops, the works within Songs in A&E mark some of Spiritualized’s darkest to date. These are not druggy, obliquely grim hallucinations but real prayers from the edges of desperation. Here was a guy who had dipped his toes in the river, making his purest gospel record ever, with the battle of heaven and hell and God and devil as central characters. The defiant blues-meets-squonk of “I Gotta Fire” sheds its harshness to flow into the absolution-seeking beg of “Soul on Fire.” The chaotic blaze of “You Lie You Cheat” segues through “Harmony 3” to a Dylan-worthy confessional “Baby I’m Just a Fool.” As much as Ladies and Gentlemen must go down as masterpiece of its time, Songs in A&E is a more realized work from the same artist toiling in the same fields of sin and salvation but with more life to put into it. Here, Pierce has created a work with the personal intensity that marks the best folk music—never a lyric wasted and stories told in plain style yet with such passion—but he has also majestically orchestrated every second, every note, in precise detail.

Looking back to 1997 and now at 2008, it becomes apparent: Radiohead may well be the most important band in the world. Jason Pierce as Spiritualized, however, might just make better records.

—donny kutzbach

After almost two decades, Spiritualized finally makes their first appearance in Buffalo this Saturday, August 2, at Town Ballroom with Detroit’s gritty garage soul maestros the Dirtbombs supporting.