Spiritualized ★★★★
Songs In A&E
FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP
Jason Pierce’s sixth outing, from 2008: the one that nearly killed him.
Circa 2005, Spiritualized’s auteur had nailed basic tracking for a swift follow-up to 2003’s Amazing Grace, when double pneumonia took him to the brink of expiry. Only after a two-year recovery and struggle to re-engage did he complete Songs In A&E, its title referring both to his hospitalisation and the keys the songs were written in. If a new cover photo of Pierce’s taped wrist mirrors Amazing Grace’s trackmark-free arm, he’d intended …A&E to be similarly unelaborate, unlike 1997’s painstakingly orchestrated Ladies And Gentlemen… Much of it follows 2007’s Acoustic Mainline live format, with blissful texture from Rhodes piano and a gospel choir. Ramalama scorchers I Gotta Fire and Yeah Yeah find Pierce howling like Damo Suzuki, but Death Take Your Fiddle and Goodnight Goodnight, though written pre-illness, chillingly document their author’s brush with mortality. On release, overshadowed by its backstory, what a neglected triumph it was.