In Song in A&E (08), Jason Pierce, the leader of Spiritualized has again produced a surprising catalogue of rock influenced by the “Stones”, soul, gospel, blues and psychedelia. In this, their sixth record, the British Band relapses into their obsessions: love, pain, death and disease; religion and redemption; escapism and journeys through space; narcosis and intoxication. The title of their new album refers to the hospital department (Accident and Emergency), where Pierce was about to die from a serious bout of pneumonia during summer 2005. This event did not play a decisive role in the album (most of the songs had already been written), but it does put the group’s creative revival into context, and the experience becomes flesh and blood in the sound of the artificial respirator in the eerie “Death take your fiddle”.
The group was formed after the break-up of cult group Spacemen 3, whose greatest hit was “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to”. Spiritualized broke onto the music scene with Lazer guided melodies (92), although it was in their third disc, the sublime Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space (97), that they came up with their original rewriting of traditional psychedelia. With Song in A&E, The group relapses into a delicately infirm and all-encompassing music that is hypnotic with heavenly choruses and ever-so-slightly distorted guitars. With influences ranging from minimalism to black spirituals, soul, psychedelia and garage rock, this is one of contemporary rock’s most seductive offerings.

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