Music (with a capital M) as medicine.
Mental, and therefore psychic, or "spiritual" healing indeed. An old idea, perhaps Jung and Freud, the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, already tried to heal some mixed-up music lover (read de-lover or demented?) with music. Perhaps just before moving on to electroshock!
As we were saying, music as medicine is certainly not an idea conceived first by Spiritualized or at least not by them alone. Yet their final product truly turns out to be something soothing and refreshing, it manages to bring relief. This must have been noticed by our "one-man band" Jason Pierce, so much so that the inside of "Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space" indeed seems more like a container of drugs than a CD cover.
Only pseudo-medical prescriptions, pharmacological advice, usage frequencies, and side effects. No lyrics, after all, who would read the chemical components of a drug? When the doctor is a former Spaceman 3, I swallow with my eyes closed, without even the "spoonful of sugar," as the pill goes down well anyway. The album is from 1997, a vast amount of musical water has flown under the bridge, yet it remains very current.
As an opening, a faint female voice announces to us that we are floating in space. The idea of flight and floating will not leave us for all 70 minutes of this masterpiece's duration (I'm already expressing a bias here). We take off with the track bearing the same name as the title, starting softly but inexorably; slow and barely audible, yet determined to stretch toward its grand symphonic finale. In the second track "Come Together," we find that virtuosic soul so dear to Jason Pierce, which had already been his manifesto of intentions on side B of "Recurring," the farewell album to Spacemen 3.
A slow piano prelude opens the urgent "All Of My Thoughts," which, skillfully enhanced by winds and harmonica, abandons its fast pace at the end to close just as it began.
In an album that doesn't feature any "filler" songs, "Home Of The Brave" and its natural conclusion "The Individual" are notable, where psychedelic guitars and distortions sound more like animal cries than solos. Finally, the rarefied space-ballad "Broken Heart" and the distinctly gospel "Cool Waves" are stunning and moving. Magniloquent soul and gospel, psychedelia, and pop symphonies for a journey through space unparalleled in the musical world.
An indisputable masterpiece of the last decade signed by Dr. J. Spaceman!
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