Spiritualized
Let it Come Down: Special Edition

Distributed by
BMG

Year: 2001

Rating: 9/10

Cat. No: 74321 878 532

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space again but this time with knobs on. Four years on from their last outing Spiritualized are back with Jason Pierce once again at the helm expanding our musical horizons by expanding his consciousness. Are you ready for take off? Sonic cathedrals of sound? Check. Heavenly choirs of angels and lush orchestration? Absolutely. Obligatory hallucinogenic references sung with typical lysergic languor? Don't be daft.

"Let It All Come Down" lifts the basic Spiritualized blueprint and takes it to the limit. What we have here basically is 63 minutes of pure psychedelic overload from the full-on call-to-arms of "On Fire" through to the final strain of the glorious gospel anthem "Lord, Can you Hear Me?"

But what does it sound like? One look at the album's credits will give you a clue - 60 piece orchestra, 15 strong London Community Gospel Choir, all manner of weird and wonderful instrumentation (Kurxwell K 2000, anybody?) as well as enough brass to give Muscle Shoals a run for their money. And somewhere, deep down in the mix, no doubt you'll find the odd kitchen sink or two being put to good use.

Over the past decade Pierce has become the Number 1 exponent of mini-rock symphonies. Admittedly, normally such a notion would send any right-minded music fan heading straight for the hills but here, as on previous excursions, there is method in the madness and the album's conceits, whilst marvellous and manifold, are very rarely gross or over the top.

The regular and the special edition CD.

What saves the band from the pernicious tag of "prog", so lazily banded around by non-believers, are the classic structures Pierce gives to his pieces. The 11 tracks on this album are all great songs in their own right. There is lush, orchestral pop, skewed avant-garde blues, bleary-eyed soul and pure heads-down no-nonsense utterly meaningful boogie. There is ambience and attitude. There are grand, beautiful sweeps of strings and vocal harmonies that will melt in your ears.

There are also, it must be said, great - and in many cases extremely witty - lyrics underpinning the entire album. Take, for example, "I don't fall off the wagon, you know/ I take a dive and go as deep as I can go" ("The Straight and the Narrow"); "Sometimes they say love is blind/but I think dumb is what they had in mind" ("Don't Just Do Something") and "Out of sight is out of mind but I think out of mind is out of sight" ("Out of Sight").

A joker, a smoker, hell, probably even a midnight toker, Jason Spaceman has returned where he left off - high and extremely mighty. Out of sight, indeed!

Review copyright © Gary Thorogood, 2001.