Let It Come Down

First, let’s dispense with all the drug talk.

The ’90s narcotic experience was a social rather than solitary one. Never mind the Mondays, even Irvine Welsh’s urchins used smack as a communal means of getting medicated. By contrast, Jason Pierce was all but alone in reverting to the romantic De Quincey archetype, holed up in his basement room with a needle and a spoon, wallowing in poppyfied ennui on tunes like ‘Home Of The Brave’.

But with Spiritualized you don’t have to get out of it to get into it. The title Let It Come Down is not necessarily a user’s application of Newton’s gravitational theory but – as one Q writer twigged – a steal from MacBeth, indicating an acceptance of the fates, no matter how gross. And the Shakespeare cop is apt, given the tales of inter-band intrigues aired by ex-members lately.

But that’s beside the point. On this fifth album Jason Pierce has condensed his streams of unconsciousness into a sequence of four or five minute set pieces that suggest musical impressions of natural phenomena; sunrises, lunar eclipses, asteroid craters and the like.

‘On Fire’ is a deceptively stumblebum opener, ‘Moonlight Drive’ tooled up with a James Bond backbeat, New Orleans horns and Herbie Hancock organ. Not for the last time in this set, it suggests William Blake-goes-gospel. Likewise ‘Do It All Over Again’ has the kind of dark/light melody Tim Wheeler might turn out after too many Steely Dan records, Pet Sounds timpani and all.

The lyrics, as ever, are solipsistic riddles about sobriety – or lack of – and the pursuit of sanctity (“The trouble with the straight and the narrow/Is it’s so thin I keep sliding off to the side”), titles like ‘Won’t Get To Heaven (The State I’m In’). Such racked emotionalism keeps Spiritualized songs out of esoterica, tempering the Floydian trippiness with Ray Charles C&W (see ‘The Straight And The Narrow’, ‘I Didn’t Mean To Hurt You’ or the soaring single ‘Stop Your Cryin’).

But here’s the crux of it. The orchestral arrangements sound as integral to the songs as the most rudimentary of guitar parts. J Pierce obviously scored these tunes from the ground up rather than attempting to tack on string, brass and woodwind charts in post production. Check out the grace with which ‘Won’t Get To Heaven’ moves from floored prayer to interzone funk by way of salamander-like marimba, truly majestic stuff. And the closing ‘Lord Can You Hear Me’ reiterates the record’s point by going back beyond the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll into the realm of gospel offerings, the prayer as a begging letter, a plea of “Is anybody up there?”

As ever, the answer’s not as important as the asking.

Come on and get healed.