Spiritualized "Pure Phase": A Detailed Review

J Spaceman lifts off with the second installment from Spiritualized that floated though the nineties on a shimmering ship of drone and spacerock that still resonates today. With Pure Phase re-released this week, it seemed a good time to publish the sample of my writing required for the pitch. The album is far more melodic and enjoyable than the memory I’d been holding all these years. I’ve grown to love this album a lot, it’s every bit as good as its predecessor and its follow up. Perhaps they’ve traded off some melody for atmosphere.

My original CD copy of this came in a glow-in-the-dark luminous jewel case. I remember not really getting into it that much, I guess because my head/ears weren’t quite ready for where Jason Pierce was taking the band at that stage-into more esoteric avante-jazz territory (courtesy of the Balanescu Quartet) and sludgy distorted garage rock psychedelia. I remember I played it a lot but never really clicked with it back then, and sold my CD during one of my late nineties CD purges. Since getting the vinyl reissue in 2010, I’ve been castigating myself.

Seems that the whole ethos behind Spiritualized albums is that they’re structured like trips, as in trips with all the go-up and comedown chaos that entails. The real comedowns would eventuate on albums like …er… Let It Come Down.

During the band’s formative years, it was brilliant when the ravers and clubbers started digging the sound. Then the wider public as well, crowned, for me, when Spiritualized appeared on a tea-time Chris Evans’ show. Evans’ socks were well and truly blown off.

Now, nearly 30 years after the release of Spiritualized’s debut lp, the band’s first four albums are being reissued. Please read on for an insiders’ account of the making of the incredible Pure Phase. Feel free to provide your thoughts in the comments.

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Spiritualized’s music has soundtracked my adult life. Being in a cultish fan group at the band’s inception was deeply thrilling and pretty cool. Having avidly read Jason Pierce’s interviews and marvelled at his encyclopaedic musical knowledge it felt like I was being led, musically speaking, to a world of possibilities.

The Eclectic Sound of "Pure Phase"

Pure Phase is more eclectic than Lazer Guided Melodies, which makes it more interesting because of its wider ranging songs and instrumentation. In addition to the usual cache of guitars and synths we get dulcimers, violins, violas, cellos, trombones, tam tams, trumpets, bammies, saxes, flutes and backing singers. In fact, Pure Phase segues the Lazer Guided Melodies ethos/aesthetic quite naturally through to the Ladies And Gentlemen album.

“You can’t really compare this record to any other because of how we mixed it; in such an “incorrect” way. We mixed the tracks twice but I couldn’t decide which one I liked better so we said “let’s have them both”. Both of them were on tape so we spent hours cutting them into usable sections. If you listen to the isolated parts, everything is incredibly simple, the horns, the slide, all these little motifs and they lock together like some strange kind of machine. Something like Kraftwerk was the nearest thing in my musical vocabulary at the time. Great rock and roll music is like systems, it has its own endless cycle. Pure Phase was Michael Nyman, Steve Reich and John Adams, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel music, and it sounds like driving as fast as you can in torrential rain. I wish I could do it now, to mix things twice and throw it together and end up with this magic world.

Step back into the ‘Shoegaze’ years and think of the bands that were around at the time. Ride with their early soundscapes from Nowhere morphing into the psychedelic pop of Going Blank Again. Swervedriver with the crushing garage psych of the brilliant Raise with killer tracks like Son Of Mustang Ford. Slowdive with the ethereal guitar laden silk. The Catherine Wheel who were so underrated with the excellent Ferment. The even more massively underrated Pales Saints - The Comforts Of Madness. Oh yes and of course the marmite sonic groundbreakers My Bloody Valentine. There are loads of bands I could quote here but I don’t want to fuckin’ bore you. Spiritualized were and always have been in a field of their own with their music to take drugs to by a musician on drugs. J Spaceman was never a stranger to mind altering substances, which you can hear on this drone masterpiece.

The debut since the split from Kember and going it alone Laser Guided Melodies was widely ignored as is Pure Phase all due to papers like Melody Maker and especially NME having multiple orgasms over Ladies & Gentleman We Are Floating In Space.

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Summer 2020. The publishers of the 33 1/3 classic album series held an open book proposal. I pitched Pure Phase by Spiritualized. The more obvious choice would’ve been the band’s breakthrough album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, which was a commercial and critical success and thrust the band into the public eye. However, I thought I could argue more convincingly for Pure Phase as I prefer that album, as much as I love LAGWAFIS. So, it has come to pass that Jason Pierce has sanctioned a re-issue of a sizeable chunk of his back catalogue.

While researching my topic, I was excited to discover a text book* Four Musical Minimalists by Keith Potter, Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths College, University of London. I thought this work could provide serious intellectual heft to my thesis as I planned to use the phasing technique as the book’s bedrock and the minimalist approach to music as applied to Pure Phase. To support my case I approached the central figures.

In terms of the recording artists, I contacted but received no word back from Pierce, keyboardist Kate Radley, or bassist Sean Cook. (I held out no hope on them replying.)◊ However, Mark Refoy, Jonny Mattock, Leon Hunt, and Alexander Bălănescu were happy to share their experiences of the sessions. My sincere thanks to them. Gratitude also to the various contributors, in the third section below, who were happy to talk about the LP and what it meant to them.

It's a bit of a caricature, but in the world of art, there are two types of practitioners: first, the artist who leaps from one subject to another, mixing media, restlessly looking for the next new thing. Then there are those who fixate on a theme and nag away at it over the years, honing and then endlessly polishing. No surprises which camp Jason Pierce would belong to - a veritable Freud or Rothko to the Hockney or Picasso of peers like Damon Albarn.

Now, this might be a problem if no one could agree on what constitutes those elements: if Pierce suddenly threw a bit of Steps into the mix or subscribed to the view that bands such as Kasabian and Coldplay aren't, frankly, shit. But thankfully, that's not the case, or at least, with this reviewer, there seems to be common ground.

Read also: Moon Phase on March 31

One other way to think about Spiritualized today is not as a tribute band to all those other acts, but a tribute to everything Spiritualized have ever done, as Pierce gets ever closer to that Platonic ideal of sound in his head.

Key Tracks and Analysis

Let's delve into some of the standout tracks from "Pure Phase":

• Medication: A huge opener, clocking in at nearly eight minutes. Starts with some wonky circus music before moving into the smooth sounds of an aural medicine, those shimmering shrill organ lines. The song trades in radical contrasts, one minute a warm ear-balm, the next a violent burst of grunge and other guitar effects - wha-monica - which lasts several bars before returning to the softness. The effect this has is one of schizoid jarring, lulling you in and startling you out of your brief highs-and why? Clearly it’s a form meeting content thing. Turn to the lyrics and we find someone addicted to “medication,” but whether that means illegal substances or a methadone program I don’t know. The whole song is high on its own magnificence. The real withdrawal starts when the album ends, and I guess this idea was pushed to its logical extreme with the medicinal “take once a day” idea behind Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.
• The Slide Song: The effect of hearing this lush wobbly trippy piece is to make you feel like you’re back in Lazer Guided Melodies territory. “The Slide Song” is all about not wanting to hurt the one you love, but at the same time, there’s a side of you that has to remain true to yourself (dedicated to exploring consciousness-expansion) and that’s where the point of difficulty arises. The song is sumptuous, slow, mesmerizing, melodic. The vocals are overlaid in a ghostly way, smooth, and lovely.
• Electric Phase: If you were enjoying “The Slide Song” too much then you were having too much of a good time, because this ‘song’ is nothing more than a roar of noise, like a hundred arc-welders working simultaneously inside an aircraft hangar, testing equipment. A transitional piece.
• All Of My Tears: Fades into view on a pulsing, helical chord. That shrill organ is still there but almost vanishing into the ether, and we get violins or cellos along with those pure phase tones. Pierce invokes the ‘Lord’ for the first time on the album. He’s hot, his heart is bleeding and he just wants water, an endless ocean, to wash away all of his tears. It’s the narcotic drone that blends between each track that drags you in to a bit of uneasy listening that makes you feel like floating, especially on the instrumental All Of My Tears.
• These Blues: Is loud and shimmering, with that wild harmonica, there to evoke the blues, but these are no backporch, beat-up guitar blues. This is more of an internal head injury, disturbed thoughts, mental anguish. Again Pierce sings to someone called “Lord” explaining that he’s not a complete goner yet, that there’s still a spark deep in his soul ripe for redemption. We never quite learn what “these blues” are that he’s gonna kick, other than it’s a screaming, distant turbulence of feedbacking guitar and demonic wha-monica. And that’s the end of Side One, alternating as it does between smooth lush mesmerizing LGM-type numbers and cold noisy chemical blues.
• Let It Flow: Throughout the song we’ve got a backing choir singing “woh-oh-woah” in a pure, smooth, processed kind of perfection, in between which Pierce sings about “it.” In this song “it” is a feeling, a high, which takes him home and if he lets it go, then he can “let it flow,” while we get that lovely choir reminding us of how damn good this feeling is: “Woh-oh-woah.” Some scratchy dirgy interlude before the bass drum starts booming beautifully beneath the whole love, the love that unfortunately also makes our poor boy “sick.” But at least for the duration of this song, he brings us, the audience, into his gorgeous flight of fancy. Dreamy tuneful stuff.
• Take Good Care Of It: Pure phase tones again, piercing shrillness, a loose feel, the sound field filled up with various drones, sustained effects moving at different speeds, in parallax, through the mix, while Pierce’s washed out voice remains buried in the midst of the angelic spheres. The version on Fucked Up Inside was quite different - far more melodic. This version is more of a sound-sculpture. Vibrations, textures, brass, piping electronic effects, a ruminative bass line, like if I had to pigeon hole it, I might come up with something lame like “ambient avante-garde jazz.” Another mood piece, this time about how love is a give and take affair. Take Good Care Of It is just pure laid back space drone that flutters with an array of instruments that buzz at your ears like a stoned butterfly caressing the lobes with a laid back sax sound.
• Born Never Asked: Is a cover from Laurie Anderson’s Big Science album, and while I’m mentioning her, I’ll throw a link down here to my review of Anderson’s amazing album Bright Red - my third favourite album of all time and something I’d expect serious Spiritualized heads to enjoy too. Her version of “Born Never Asked” has lyrics, eschewed here for the instrumental effect. I guess the title says it all really. Born Never Asked cranks up the noise a touch with some doom laden guitars backed with a grand violin sound that melts into your brain.
• Electric Mainline: With some kind of fantastic woodwind effect that I love to bits, and it faintly reminds me of a track by Howie B called “Gallway” from his album Snatch, a headphone classic. The bass and drums are quite prominent in propelling the song along. There’s a lot going on here. Maybe we’re tripping on electricity, a theme that comes up several times in future Spiritualized releases - musical odes to the wonders of electrons and protons, a metaphor for the surge of chemicals in your bloodstream, a charge that blisses you out, take you to some higher realm and then wafts you along like a bird asleep inside a cloud. Again, this deals in Lazer Guided Melodies aesthetics to some extent, proving the idea that Pure Phase is very much the transition from LGM to Ladies & Gentlemen. The effects creep in on the drone epic Electric Mainline, with chilled acid tingling sonic landscapes. I’m getting fuckin’ flashbacks as I type!
• Lay Back In The Sun: Sounds suspiciously like a repeat of LGM’s “I Want You.” This is a more upbeat vocal number, driving distorted guitar, a sustained cymbal-echo dreaming in the background. Lyrically the song is about having a good time in the sun, but of course this involves some “good dope.” This also harks back to that Beach Boys-esque surf-feel of LGM. About halfway through the song, everything drops out of the mix and we get Spiritualized-in-dub, very nice. Doesn’t last long enough. Everything’s not as great as it seems, though, because in this song the singer has “a fever” inside of his soul, a fire inside. Lay Back In The Sun is just fuckin’ excellent and harks back to my days when they blew my mind in a sun filled field in Preston, drinking 20/20 and necking microdots… A hazed trip of dreams on the lush grass.
• Pure Phase: This track is like a bleaker version of “Symphony Space” from LGM. Phase tones, tremeloes, sweeping hither thither like autumnal winds, snowdrifts, or more aptly, outer space radio waves, alien frequencies. Pulses, ringing, what’s left after all the good times have gone, a wasteland, an empty hollow head. These stratospheric-straddling drones waver around for a good several minutes and the concept of ‘spandrels’ comes into play. Between the shifting tones, phases are created, those intra-dimensional spaces between the main tones, the small spaces, where other things happen. Title track Pure Phase goes all drone again and Pierce excels in those weird warped effects that challenge your brain with that feeling of your imagined image of travelling to space in a minute capsule, shooting stars drifting past your craft in slow motion and exploding into a rainbow of sparks like a good trip.
• Spread Your Wings: Is slow and mournful sounding, yet hope is apparent in the lyrics-a “you can do anything you set your heart to” positive thinking song, if you’d only “spread your wings.” So we’re back to the flight theme of Lazer Guided Melodies again, which is really a metaphor for getting high and staying that way. I guess this is where the Balanescu Quartet joins in because now we’ve got cellos and violins and violas creating a stunningly sorrowful melody over top of the noise. In this song, the narrator appeals to “babe” - “You know I’ll take / Just a little bit more.” Here “time goes slowly by.” It all starts to sound rather grande towards the end, with that string section, portentous and magical and maybe a teeny bit bloated. In my mind Pierce is suggesting the possibilities for where he plans to take Spiritualized - a bigger, more grandiose ambition. Spread Your Wings is just a joy to hear again with the lush strings, warped vocals and a feeling that’s so chilled out and beautiful it’s insane.
• Feel Like Goin’ Home: Uses more strings, with a lovely analog synth melody, farfisa, lots of background motion, and more of those tunnel tones. "Going home" has to be a metaphor for climbing back inside the womb and returning to some blissful state of pre-birth.
• Good Times: And let’s finish Side Four with some more of those rock’n’roll good times. Makes me think of The Cars, dammit. Here at least we’ve got loud guitars and that wicked wha-monica . “Hey baby / You know I love you / Gonna make you know what it’s all about.” These lyrics aren’t really much better than Cars lyrics it has to be said. But the music sounds more like wild noisy white blues again. It opens with pure phase tones, but soon expands into a rock beat, and brings the noise with lots of tremulous keyboards. Instruments with names like ‘fender precision’ and ‘fender thinline’ inform the noisy guitar nature of this, but the tune is a slight thing and it all seems a little familiar. The pace quickens into something racy and frenetic. Couldn’t really catch much of the lyrics. Good Times has that honky tonk harmonica vibe that ramps the blues up a notch and sounds like the Spaceman is enjoying a rare rock out moment from the spliffed out droned theme of the whole affair.

So we get ‘pure phases’ throughout the album like a recurring motif.

Opener Medication is full of shimmering sounds and astonishing effects that has hints of the way forward for Pierce. You have the magic melancholia of the beautiful Slide Song followed by the crunching sonic blast of Electric Phase.

Then the effects creep in on the drone epic Electric Mainline, with chilled acid tingling sonic landscapes.

In my opinion this was J. Spaceman’s drug album extraordinaire. It floats, flirts with gospel and blues, drones, wigs out and generally sounds like the recently cleaned rusty key opening the lock to the rich cabinets of the Spiritualized vaults that follow.

Probably the most groundbreaking drone album made in size and scope.

Pure Phase Album Cover

After this gig in support of Spiritualized's new album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light (a very them title), I looked back at my reporter's notebook to find the following references scribbled down: Can, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Beach Boys circa Smile, Subway Sect, Johnnie Ray, Low-era Bowie, Hendrix's "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)", Dr John, John Coltrane, Sly Stone and the Velvet Underground, of course.

Buried deep in the DNA of "Hey Jane", which started proceedings and also kicks off the new album, there are surely traces of Chuck Berry, too.

So Pierce has nothing if not impeccable taste, and the staging for the evening was cool as well: dressed head to toe in white (plus shades), he was joined by two similarly attired gospel backing singers, with an expanse of floor space between them and the rest of the band. Projected on to the screen at the back were all sorts of trippy visuals - occasion once more to bring out the notepad: "Max's Kansas City!" - or sometimes washes of pure colour and light.

The set was drawn from the course of the band's career, with the exception of their debut, Lazer Guided Melodies, released 20 years ago. This meant oscillating between Sweet Heart Sweet Light and 2003's Amazing Grace, and then between that album and 1995's Pure Phase - but anyone coming fresh to this music would have found it hard to discern great stylistic switches. At the end came "The Twelve Steps", from 2001's Let it Come Down, and a closing brace of 1997's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space's "Electricity" and an epic "Cop Shoot Cop".

That last number borrows its key lines about "a hole in my arm where all the money goes/ Jesus Christ died for nothin', I suppose" from John Prine's 1971 classic song about heroin addiction, "Sam Stone": further evidence that Pierce has always listened to the good stuff.

And then throughout there are the oh so familiar references to more druggy business and lots about Jesus and the Lord.

One other problem: Spiritualized fans all tend to be blokes of a certain age, which, when you realise that you must be counted as one of their number, makes the gig-going experience a bit depressing.

But shut your eyes, hunker down, and as the wall of sound - quick scribble: "Phil Spector" - breaks over you, it's hard not to succumb, such is the perfect storm of noise that the band create.

Couldn’t really catch much of the lyrics.

Spiritualized Live Performance

Here is a table summarizing the key aspects of the album:

Aspect	Description
Genre	Space rock, psychedelic rock, drone
Key Instruments	Guitars, synths, dulcimers, violins, cellos, trombones, saxes, flutes
Themes	Drugs, spirituality, love, internal struggles
Similar Artists	Spacemen 3, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive

tags: #spiritualized #pure #phase