In June 2005, Jason Pierce, the main visionary behind Spiritualized’s orchestral drug rock, was rushed to Royal London Hospital, where he was diagnosed with bilateral pneumonia and experienced a near brush with his longtime lyrical preoccupation: death.
After being revived, Pierce was hospitalized in the accident and emergency ward of the hospital, surrounded by the constant ambient buzz of life-support machines. The buzz and clatter of the intensive care ward provided Pierce with an odd sense of peace, referring to the noise as “oddly beautiful, like music,” in a March 2008 interview with The Observer. The calming ambience of the accident and emergency ward would provide the namesake for Pierce’s sixth studio album as Spiritualized’s “Songs in A&E.”
Prior to his hospitalization, Pierce had been composing songs for his first album since 2003’s “Amazing Grace.” He planned to release the album quietly, with little of the attendant fanfare that had accompanied each release after Spiritualized gained commercial and critical acclaim with 1997’s “Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space.” However, after returning from his hospitalization, Pierce perceived a deep connection between his musical sketches and near-fatal experience and reworked the songs with renewed sense of purpose and vigor.
Between the fall of 2006 and the winter of 2007, Pierce took several of these songs and other Spiritualized classics on the road with his “Acoustic Mainlines” tour lineup, consisting of a four-piece gospel choir and a small string section. For a songwriter who infamously employed more than 100 musicians to compose his 2001 album “Let it Come Down,” this was as close to a stripped-down troupe as could be expected. The cathartic performances of the “Acoustic Mainlines” tour evidenced Spiritualized’s ability to make grand, sweeping statements with more restrained musical gestures. Similarly, “Songs in A&E” finds Pierce at his most reserved and efficient, tempering the self-indulgence that accompanied his often grandiose musical impulses.
The album’s final product follows the long and arduous process in its composition. It thus feels like a relatively sparse and muted comedown following Pierce’s 20-plus years of musical output obsessed, lyrically and musically, with finding love and spiritual transcendence in drug-laden psychedelia and space-traveling headphone symphonies.
Reminders of his hospitalization permeate the album. The additional album artwork provided with the album’s limited-edition release are photographs of intravenous catheters mounted on a wall, oddly resembling religious emblems. The drugs for Pierce are now clinical, not recreational. In eerily appealing “Death Take Your Fiddle,” Pierce sings, “Think I’ll dream myself into a coma / And I’ll take every way out I can find / With morphine, codeine, whiskey, they won’t alter / The way I feel now death is not around,” while samples of wheezing ventilator breaths provide the thematic counterpoint, displaying the fatality inherent in self-medication. “Sitting on Fire,” finds Pierce sullen and trapped, as if composed while in his hospital bed. The pure wanderlust of the dusty pedal-steel guitar underscores ache in his quavering voice and in the deathbed pathos of the lyrics.
However, on “Songs in A&E,” Pierce is not merely morbid and defeated, attempting to find solace amid constant reminders of pain and fatality. Ennio Morricone strings that frame on “Sitting on Fire,” lending the song a cinematic grace and majestic sweep that has long been the focal point of Spiritualized’s appeal. On “Sweet Talk,” an angelic gospel choir and lifting horns envelope the song’s melancholic core of lugubrious bass and Pierce’s fractured vocal. And the album’s single “Soul on Fire” finds anthemic glory in its rousing, cheap seat-reaching chorus.
When Pierce arrived to the stage during the Acoustic Mainlines performances, he would enter cheering, presumably for himself. Yet within the context of his hospitalization and the creative resurgence that materialized as “Songs in A&E,” his self-cheering can hardly be dismissed as arrogant or self-indulgent. Pierce rose from near fatal experience to compose some of the most moving songs in his long career. A comeback album in the truest sense.
““ Ross Rinehart
E-mail Rinehart at rrinehart@media.ucla.edu.