Spiritualized - Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space

9.5 - England - 1997

-- Masterpiece --

Screw Blood On The Tracks; this is the greatest break-up album of all time. It’s more or less a concept album in which Jason Pierce (trading as J Spaceman) deals with the loss of his beloved by doing lots or heroin. The fact that his ex, Kate Radley, was still in the band and played keyboards on the album must have made for some awkward recording sessions (plus she left him to secretly marry the Verve’s Richard Ashscroft, which must have rather stung). In any event, despite being an exercise in abject self-pity, the album is fucking gorgeous. The pinnacle of shoe-gaze, each track is built out of layers and layers of impeccably arranged sheets of guitars, keyboards, strings, kitchen sinks, and horns.

The opening title-track begins things off with a hypnotic, building round (which, for the 1997 edition, skirted copyright law by not quite quoting Elvis Presley). “Come Together” is one of the albums rockers (as with the lead single “Electricity”, it doesn’t quite work as well as the ballads) and illustrates the record’s single weakness: the somewhat affected listlessness of Pier-, I mean, Spaceman’s singing. But that is a minor criticism; there are no major weak points on this record, nor are there any duff tracks. Everything fits.

A few highlights to mention: “I Think I’m In Love” is the album’s brightest tune, although each positive statement is offset by a following doubt: “I think I can fly / Probably just falling”. And besides, he’s not singing about a woman, but rather “my spike and my arm and my spoon”. Yeesh. In lesser hands, the bathetic heroin chic would be cringey, but Spaceman gets a pass on account of his arrangements. The album’s mid-point – the devastating two-fer of “Home Of The Brave” and “The Individual” – takes the listener from the depths of solipsistic despair (“I don’t even miss you / But that’s cause I’m fucked up / And sure when it wears off / Then I will be hurting”) to the outer reaches of interstellar space through the free-jazz ambience of “The Individual”.

The second half is dominated by two long tracks: the opiated heartbreak of “Broken Heart” and the mesmerizingly circular “Cop Shoot Cop...”, the title of which is not intended to describe a policeman assaulting a fellow officer, but rather the cycle of a heroin user (sort of like the cycle neatly described by the unreleased Spaceman 3 album title Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To). Based around a loping Dr. John piano groove (the good doctor also contributes some vocals and reportedly declared the quite psychedelic track to be, and I’m paraphrasing from memory, “just what we were trying to do in the sixties”), “Cop Shoot Cop...” periodically explodes, Art-Ensemble-of-Chicago-like, into squalls of free jazz noise. Midway through, these squalling bursts take over and the track becomes an exercise in sublime noise. But by far the best part is how the loping piano groove remerges and slowly subdues the din (with the help of a mariachi-esque trumpet) and leads the track (and album) out on a long, subdued fade-out. Perhaps not better living through chemistry, but maybe better feeling through chemistry.