Accident and Emergency

I own almost every Spiritualized album, but honestly probably haven't listened to one from start to finish since about 2005. It's not without a lack of inspiration, but there are just some bands you tend to forget about when they take 5 years to release a new record (to be fair, severe illness played a big part in the delay). Also, it helps if I'm in a certain mood when I put on a Spiritualized album, and that's the sort of mood that doesn't come around completely often if you know what I mean. The band's magic is fully revealed to you if their music is played in the perfect setting. So for the first time since 2003's "Amazing Grace," Spiritualized is back with new material in the form of "Songs in A&E" which arrived in stores yesterday.

By all means it seems that coming so close to death in 2005 has changed J. Spaceman even if most of these songs were written before that tragic experience. What the 5 year gap has done most is to help Spaceman come up with a brilliant and revised sound for the band. Less reliant on the overly grandiose symphonic and bombastic qualities of the last couple records, Spiritualized take a much more tempered and simplistic approach with "Songs in A&E." In a way it's a look back to the early days of the band, before things got a little too complicated. You could say that this is J. Spaceman showing a bit of restraint, allowing things to build in a sense. But if you're a fan of the band's most recent material then there's little bits for you as well. There's a few tracks that are rollicking electric guitar-heavy cuts, and there's plenty of strings and symphonic elements too, though they're sparser than they used to be. I guess you could call this album a great mixture of elements pulled from various stages of Spiritualized's long and storied career.

And hey, there's some new elements to the Spiritualized sound as well. There's clearly a blues and alt-country influence playing a role on a bunch of songs, and that's sorta new. The most noticeable change however is the pure and raw emotion spread across the record. Oh yeah, the lyrical content is still very much in the themes of love and loss, it's just never been at the forefront of the Spiritualized sound. With the realization of how fragile life can be, Spaceman combines the dark, often death-centered lyrics with the sparse melodies that are very unobtrusive but still pack a big punch. While the songs may jump around stylistically on the instrumental side, the lyrical cohesion and chainlinks provided by the short "Harmony" tracks create an overall record that's classic Spiritualized. "Songs in A&E" might not be the mind-blowing listening experience that an album like "Ladies and Gentlement We Are Floating in Space" was, but I'd say it comes pretty close. For the record, one of my favorite albums by the band.

Spiritualized- The Waves Crash In

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Labels: spiritualized