A worthwhile accompaniment to Spiritualized’s last LP ‘And Nothing Hurt’?
While the lockdowns were awful for most, as someone who actively chooses self-isolation as a way of getting by in the world it was something of a balm for Jason Pierce.
Finally afforded the peace and quiet which would allow the noises and music in his head a chance to breathe, Pierce re-commenced word on some of the demos that didn’t make the cut from his last album, 2018’s And Nothing Hurt.
Everything Was Beautiful does work as a companion piece of sorts (as noted by the linking titles, which taken in reverse order are a quotation from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five) to the previous album, but only in the way that all Spiritualized albums refer to each other.
Indeed, this album opens with a reading of the title, this time from Pierce’s daughter Poppy, in the same style that his then-girlfriend Kate Radley read the name of 1997’s seminal Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. The pharmaceutically-themed artwork can’t entirely be a coincidence either.
All the familiar Spiritualized sounds are here, but since Pierce has never been reluctant to throw the kitchen sink into his oceans of noise, such a statement is meaningless.
Better to say that the familiar tricks are here: the opening track Always Together With You builds as it goes, a list of promises (‘If you walk the galaxies, I would walk the galaxies for you’ etc) as layer upon layer of instrumentation is added along with huge, Beach Boys-esque vocal choirs to create a maelstrom of noise.
The same approach goes for the closing track, the nine-minute I’m Coming Home Again. To call it sprawling is to do it a disservice; there’s everything here from an impressively wired guitar solo to clarinets bashing into horns, bashing into the rhythm section.
Never one for subtlety, especially at the cost of theatricality, Pierce goes for broke musically while attempting to coalesce his thoughts into words: ‘I’ve kind of had it with philosophy ‘cos I’m thinking I am, but I’m failing to be.’
The middle five songs aren’t lacking in scale either. The swaying Best Thing You Never Had is a Velvet Underground drone backed with 70’s Stones’ menacing, gospel brass and epic in scale, while Let It Bleed (ahem) is more of a heartbreaking lullaby (‘I wanted it to cut deeper and darker for you’) with lilting strings and finger-plucked guitar. Crazy goes one step further, a Tammy Wynette style ballad complete with slide guitar.
The A Song (Laid In Your Arms) (7 minutes) goes full on free-jazz, with horns and choir which culminates in a collision of indiscernible musical noises that are best described as a motorway pile-up.
The Mainline Song, meanwhile, opens with a recording of a train going through a tunnel (in parallel with the aeroplane on Always Together With You) and, while it’s no Station To Station, it does successfully imitate Kraftwerk in its sense of purpose and momentum.
Partially inspired by the murder of George Floyd (‘There’s a change in the air round here/And I wanted to know if you wanted to take the city tonight’) it has an energy and vitality that is largely (and intentionally) absent elsewhere, although it once again refers to the past with a lyrical call-back; ‘sweet heart, sweet light’.
Everything Was Beautiful sits well in the Spiritualized canon, even if it is something of a melting pot of former glories. Jason Pierce is simply too talented, his attention to detail too intensive, his quality levels too high and his devotion to his art too immersive to ever make a bad album.
But this 11th album is nothing you haven’t heard from him before.
