Lurking on the edge of every great drug trip is
the threat of death, the hint that one might never come down. Few musicians
have captured that peculiar mix of euphoria and existential panic like
Spiritualized's Jason Pierce, who, beginning with Spacemen 3's credo of "taking
drugs to make music to take drugs to," has built his career on the sound of
getting so fucked up that it feels like dying. But the new Songs In A&E; is the sound of rebirth:
Barely surviving a bout of life-threatening pneumonia in 2005, Pierce spent
time in the accident-and-emergency ward (the A&E; of the title), and it was
only through working on the Mr. Lonely score for Harmony Korine—honored
here by three instrumental tracks bearing his name—that Pierce regained
the confidence to come back to the Songs he'd been forced to abandon.
How fortunate he did, because Songs In A&E; is Pierce's best work
since Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space—and easily his most
personal. While Pierce's haunting hymns have always been rooted in simplicity,
most Spiritualized records have buried them under layers of feedback or gauzy
stratosphere. Songs strips them down to their vulnerable core, with Pierce's
voice sounding unnervingly ragged on confessionals like "Death Take Your
Fiddle," backed by a mournful choir and the morbid whooshing of a ventilator.
But even for an album whose final words are "funeral home" (on the
heartbreaking eulogy "Goodnight, Goodnight"), there's still plenty of uplift,
from the Can-esque freak-blues of "I Gotta Fire" and "Yeah Yeah" to the gospel
sing-along of "Soul On Fire," which boasts one of the most stirring choruses
Pierce has ever written. Death has never sounded so alive.