Reviews
Spiritualized
Ladies And Gentlemen We Are floating In Space
NME writer's top 50 albums of the year
"Ladies and Gentlemen...We have a Winner
No.1 Album of the year: Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen...We are Floating In Space.
It was the year where the big guns returned. Mighty in the extreme, the name players of the soul-rock panoply (Spiritualized, Radiohead(Ok Computer), The Verve(Urban Hymns)) returned to wear their hearts boldly on their sleeves, their experimentation and genius carrying all before them...
Jason Pierce emerges from the studio with the most all-encompassing, sonically breathtaking, utterly moving album of 1997. A true classic."
***** EVEN BETTER CD OF THE WEEK
"30 years to the day, near as dammit, since the release of Sergeant Pepper, Pierce delivers a work that comes close to capturing the spirit, the scale, the beauty and impact of the defining album of the sixties moment.
Pierce has plundered his influences to produce a unique album, a record to bring tears to the eyes, a record that grabs the Beatles, introduces them to Beefheart, takes the lot of them surfing with the Beach Boys and gets the Balanescu Quartet to arrange the result. And that's just the Bs. Pierce does the whole alphabet, believe me. Record of the week? Definitely. The year? Almost certainly? The decade? Ditto."
VOX Albums of the year
No.2 Album of the year : Spirtualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating In Space. *****
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is hugely effective in every meaningful sense. And it soared high in the national charts too. like the Verve, Spiritualized have made a glorious return from the shoegazing dead.
There is vast and then there is, like, VAST. Complex, but not overly complicated, Ladies and Gentlemen... is a huge, capital-letter-friendly affair of the heart. Sometimes it is bitter and quite, quite twisted. At others, it is beautiful and breathtaking in its scope and shimmering elegance."
"Every now and then along comes an album with class stamped all over it. Such is the case with Ladies and Gentlemen....
Layer upon layer of sound mix together in great clouds of orchestration, then drift apart leaving cascading guitar melodies or the haunting vocal of Jason Pierce, telling of broken hearts and wanton drug abuse. what more can you ask for? A wonderous adventure that grows and grows."
Back"Ladies and Gentlemen is a progressive, psychedelic record, but not in the usual sense of using a range of cliches to evoke the spirit of the 1960s. This is new music and Pierce will use anything to get the mood he wants. Brass, strings and choral passages are fed into the organic-sounding mix, which is in essence a treatise on the hypnotic power of repetition, delivered with great melodic force. So many groups have tried to sound like this over the years and failed. Here’s one that succeeds. Spiritualized's last album was magnificent: this is better."