Spiritualized
Amazing Grace

THE REVIEW

The cardboard that holds the CD depicts only a bare, genderless arm reaching out to nowhere against an ice-gold background. The actual CD is entirely white and bears nothing but the words Amazing Grace® on the front and Spiritualized® on the back. I finally have the new Spiritualized album in my hands, and just looking at it reminds me of the expansive atmospheres of their masterpiece, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.

It's quite a challenge to engage with the 1997 album-drug, which splendidly defined Jason Pierce & Co's rich space-rock vein, stringing together gem-like tracks one after another...

The sounds are still the same, teetering between distorted obsessions and minimal poetry (see the furious This Little Life Of Mine and the sweet Hold On); meanwhile, the orchestral component is less insistent, a link between the previous two studio albums, which, when mixed with keyboards and choruses, feedback, and harmonicas, constitutes the trademark of Spiritualized's music.

The quality of the pieces is on average lower compared to the 1997 benchmark; however, Jason "Spaceman" Pierce—whose mind can certainly not be called sane—knows well how to convince me of his songwriting genius, producing his beautiful melodies and painting them with a voice increasingly adept at characterizing mood changes. He insistently shouts, "I am never goin’ back / I am never comin’ back," but then closes with a subtle, trembling yet reassuring invitation: "If you've got dreams in your heart / why don’t you share them with me / and if dreams don’t come true I’ll make sure that your nightmares are through."

Go on, Jason.