Cigarette Tricks: What to Download Tuesday: Spiritualized

Jason Pierce doesn't have an easy time making music. Spiritualized records, it seems, are almost always the products of suffering. From a debut album, Lazer Guided Melodies, crafted around the drawn out dissolution of Spaceman 3, to their 1997 masterpiece, Ladies and Gentlemen...We Are Floating in Space, which was written in the wake of frontman Peirce's messy breakup with girlfriend, and then Spiritualized keyboard player, Kate Radley (she left Pierce in 1995 for The Verve's Richard Ashcroft, so, yeah, maybe Pierce should just be thankful she left before he ended up doing something regrettable like Human Conditions). The last Spiritualized record, 2008's Songs In A & E, came on the heels of Pierce's near death experience after a bout with double pneumonia landed him in ICU battling type 1 respiratory failure. So, in the four years in between Songs In A & E and the release of the new Spiritualized record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light, you think life would have handed J Spaceman an easy one. But no. Instead, Peirce was diagnosed with a life threatening liver disease ("My liver was gone, basically," he told The Guardian's Dave Simpson). He has spent the last couple of years undergoing an experimental drug therapy, taking a chemical cocktail originally given to leukemia patients to combat his degenerative liver disease. Sweet Heart Sweet Light, the seventh Spiritualized album, out today on Fat Possum, was made during this treatment process; and the irony of the fact that a man who used to be in a band whose motto was "taking drugs to make music to take drugs" made an album on life-saving medicines has not been lost on anyone, including Pierce himself. "I decided to make a record on these drugs," he joked with Simpson, adding, "[t]he further I get away from the treatment the more I feel it wasn't me making that record...It was like I wasn't in my own head."

Sweet Heart Sweet Light is a Spiritualized record. Unmistakably. It touches on all of the thematic hallmarks that Pierce has wrestled with since his days in Spaceman 3 -- primarily, death, desperation, Jesus and Rock 'n Roll -- and doing so in Pierce's trademark mash-up of the blues, gospel, psychedelia, and rock. And while Pierce has never made a bad record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light is hands-down the best thing he has done since Ladies and Gentlemen...We Are Floating in Space. It's the most immediate, most sincere, most fragile that Pierce has sounded on a record since that 1997 classic, and the batch of songs here is arguably the most varied and accessible batch of his career. I've already written a little bit about first single "Hey Jane" in previous posts. But it's a brilliant song, whose lyrical themes and musical brilliance are indicative of the album as a whole. At nine-minutes in length, "Hey Jane" starts out as a balls-out rocker, with the singer urgently wondering about the trials-and-tribulations of daily life, which the every person "Jane" of the title performs without any larger meaning or purpose, let alone even time to think about these things: "Said you ain't got time to search for...running so fast you get no place." Eventually things crash, for "Jane" and, musically, for the song itself. Around the three minute mark the song unravels into a mess of guitar and cymbal crashes. From here, "Hey Jane" transforms both musically and lyrically into a spine tingling meditation on human limitations, death and the redemptive power of love. And so by the time the refrain "Sweet heart, sweet light/sweet heart, love of my life" kicks in to close out the track out, what started out as a balls-out rocker has transformed into a thing of beauty and transcendence that, for me at least, hits me in the gut every time (and being absolutely winded by the AG Rojas directed video probably doesn't help with this feeling). It's quite a thing. And it's only one such moment on Sweet Heart Sweet Light, an an album that meditates over-and-over again on questions of human weakness and desperation, but which not only seeks solace from these existential limitations in music, but which still believes in, and searches for, that transcendent moment in music -- and in Rock 'n Roll in particular.

Album closer, "So Long, You Pretty Things," admits some defeat here. I was wrong to previously worry about the inclusion of Pierce's daughter, Poppy, here. The sense of both frailty and optimism that her voice brings at the opening of the track only highlights the overriding themes of the album. A nod to the Bowie classic, and in turn to era and the idea of rock 'n roll decadence, the first half of "So Long, You Pretty Things," meditates on failure and loss, with Pierce pleading to Jesus for guidance, hoping for a reason to go on. But just as the sense of defeat here seems insurmountable, the track suddenly transforms into an Oasis-style sing-along that both laments and celebrates the death of rock 'n roll dreams: "So long, you pretty things, God save your little soul/The music that you played so hard ain't on your radio/And all your dreams of diamond rings and all that rock 'n roll can bring you/Sail on, so long." And even as it marks another moment of failure -- i.e., the death of a scene, the inability of music to overcome inevitable defeat and loss -- it's another beautiful musical moment. At the very least, it makes me want to sing along. And that's what, at its best, Sweet Heart Sweet Light accomplishes: even as these songs let us know that we are all ultimately going to be losers at the game of life, they makes us all feel like beautiful losers for singing along.

Other notable new releases this week include Spencer Krug's new Moonface record with Finish band Siinai (that's one, like the Spiritualized record, that we've been looking forward to for some time). Twee-poppers Allo Darlin' release their sophomore record Europe and another Curb compilation looking to cash in on Hank III but which is still nevertheless worth checking out -- it features six covers and some outtakes from Hank's first two Curb records. Full list after the jump.

Spirtualized, Sweet Heart Sweet Light