You get the sense that Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce is actively signposting his latest album’s charms. Everything Was Beautiful’s medication-style packaging echoes that of the band’s 1997 classic, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, as does the female voice that announces the record (then: former band member Kate Radley, now: Pierce’s daughter Poppy); the astronaut’s eye-view of human fallibility is here too.
One of the chief pleasures of Spiritualized, now as then, is the sweet din Pierce and his accomplices can create – a millefeuille of influences, counter-currents, drones and melodies layered magnificently but unsteadily upon one another. This ninth outing is Pierce’s most assured in some time, doling out extra helpings of heady patisserie. More than half the album is devoted to elegiac maximalism, with blaring jazz brass over mantric repetitions (The A Song (Laid in Your Arms), ecstatic keyboards over RSI-inducing train rhythms (The Mainline Song) or the punishing orchestral wallop of Let It Bleed (for Iggy), in which Pierce sings tenderly of not being able to accurately render the depth of his feeling before finding the right key change. For respite, there’s a waltzing country love song, Crazy, with former tour mate Nikki Lane on backing vocals, and the loose, swinging lope of Best Thing You Never Had.
