Day tripping

Spiritualized come down to Earth

by Amy Finch

Jason Pierce always wears a wry smile when he names his CDs. It's a habit he picked up back when he was a member of the pioneering British trance-rock trio Spacemen 3. Those guys were the ultimate sensualists, dealing in tone-drone shimmers custom built for drug-trip enhancement. With a wink and a nudge, they called their albums names like Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To (Bomp) and The Perfect Prescription (Fire/Taang!). Not that a Spacemen 3 listening session required a stick in the vein or a special sugarcube -- their languid layerings of guitar, organ, feedback, and cool grace were sufficiently brain-bending ˆ la carte.

Pierce has carried on that titular drollery with his current band, Spiritualized, whose third CD, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Dedicated/Arista), is just out. Like much of the first two Spiritualized discs -- Lazer Guided Melodies and Pure Phase (both on Dedicated) -- Ladies hovers at high altitudes. Yet for all Pierce's enchantment with celestial waves of repetition, this time he's delivered some of Spiritualized's most earthbound and confessional moments yet.

Unlike his former Spacemen partner, Sonic Boom, who's carried matters to the evaporation point with Experimental Audio Research and, more recently, Spectrum, Pierce's approach to ambiance is more corporeal. Ladies reportedly took months of mixing-board futzing before its multi-layered mood was set, but the line-up -- Pierce, keyboardist Kate Radley, bassist Sean Cook, drummer Damon Reece, and occasional guitarist John Coxon -- are said to have spent just two weeks laying down tracks. It was the first time they had recorded live in the studio, which would account for the disc's solid, poppy snap. "Think I'm in Love" has three sections -- the last and longest is clean and buoyant, with a melody and a kick of drums so crisp, you can hardly reconcile it with the first two more characteristic swirly excursions.

Pierce has always been a master of swirly excursions, which more often than not have alluded to mind-altering chemicals in words and/or mood. "Nineteen eighty-seven, all I wanna do is get stoned," went an early Spacemen 3 song. But in 1997, even when the music drifts into the heavens, Pierce's drug references have a darker purpose -- his pleasure in mind-expanding substances has mutated into a strict desire to be made numb. "Sometimes have my breakfast right off of the mirror/And sometimes I'll have it right out of a bottle," he sings on "Home of the Brave," a brutal-but-lovely tragedy done in unadorned acoustic guitars. "I don't even miss you," the verse continues, "but that's cuz I'm fucked up."

For fans of the old Spiritualized and Spaceman 3, Ladies provides some startling revelations, as the usually reticent frontman comes staggering out from behind the psychedelic haze to express his despair over a love gone sour -- the abstract has become literal. At one point, the heartache is cushioned by a tenderness so strong it hints of hope. On the title track, Pierce sings lyrics from Elvis's "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" over music lilting and creamy enough that the vision of romance it conjures seems to imply a second chance.

Mostly, though, Ladies conveys the knowledge that it's over. "Broken Heart," with its elegiac orchestrations (courtesy of the Balanescu Quartet), is the most naked declaration of Pierce's career. "Now I've got a broken heart," he intones with exquisite fragility. "And I'm wasted all of the time/I gotta drink you right off of my mind" -- rather removed from the beatific portraits of self-medication Spiritualized used to paint.

More often than not, the music that ebbs and flows behind Pierce's melancholy musings on Ladies reflects his troubled state of mind. But the disc is more than a vaporous mirage of hurt and romantic obsession. Once again Pierce has brought in a full gospel choir -- as he did on Pure Phase -- and that naturally gives the bitterly sarcastic "Think I'm in Love" a celestial slant. He's also inspired by his darker mood to bring in the eminent New Orleans pianist Dr. John, whose black-magic interludes give the disc's 16-minute closing number, "Cop Shoot Cop," an earthy kind of bleakness that's as lowdown as earlier Spiritualized was exuberant. Rather than lying back in the sun, fueled by good dope, Pierce concludes this trip with a hole in the arm and a dead glaze on his soul -- floating in space and face down in the bayou.