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Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light

Double Six/Spaceman

Ever since Jason Pierce cheated death in 2005, Spiritualized seems to have taken on a more literal meaning for the founding member of the seminal Brit acid-rock outfit Spacemen 3. Not that he wasn’t already moved by American Pentecostalism and gospel music in his youth (remember S3’s “Walking with Jesus”?), but on Sweet Heart Sweet Light —Pierce’s first
Spiritualized project in four years, and the very first to have been written and produced in full after his near fatal bout with double pneumonia—he sounds both anguished and exultant, caught between the gift of a new lease on life and the curse of this mortal coil. If you’re familiar with the music of Spiritualized, especially 1997’s psychedelic lodestone Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, then you know that Pierce has always felt shattered by the beauty of the world in some form or fashion. What’s different this time is the musical breadth that he accesses to express it—from the sheets of guitar feedback that drive the eight minute “Heading for the Top” to the mournful strings and churchy chorus of “Life Is a Problem.” Through it all, there are sonic nods to the Velvet
Underground (the opening cut “Hey Jane”), Abbey Road-era Beatles (the creepily insistent “Mary” and the epic “I Am What I Am,” which, at its core, captures the brooding languor of
“Come Together” before it flies apart in a wave of improvised noise) and even the country-folk side of Wilco (“Freedom”). Familiar references aside though, SHSL is Spiritualized
at its very best—heavy, hypnotic and endlessly suggestive.