As their most famous album, "Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space" (1997) shows, Spiritualized are masters at channeling heavy emotions through dense, elaborate arrangements and production techniques. The noise?filled droning and expansive soundscapes were all skillfully employed in conveying the album's dark themes. Songwriter Jason Pierce's penchant for lavish melodies was always tempered and obscured by these production choices, making for a tense listening experience that never quite resolves itself, leaving listeners with a desire to start all over again.
Spiritualized's latest album, "Sweet Heart Sweet Light," could hardly be more different. Where "Ladies and Gentleman" was conflicted and brooding, "Sweet Heart Sweet Light" is gentle and almost life?affirming, even when Pierce is delivering his notoriously bleak lyrics.
After a brief intro, the album segues into "Hey Jane," one of its stronger tracks. A rock beat supports Pierce's distorted guitar strumming while a second guitar traces out the song's primary hook, which gets a pretty thorough treatment over the course of the song's eight minutes and fifty?two seconds.
"Hey Jane" gets most of its energy from finding new ways to expand this small line. When Pierce brings in backup singers to sing the line, he fills out the sound space and starts building towards a climax that comes in an interesting form. Heavily processing guitars and synths overpower the rest of the mix before the song seemingly fades out, only to come back with a refreshingly clean guitar and a new arrangement of the song's primary theme. While Spiritualized get a lot of mileage out of the song's core ideas, they do feel a bit stretched beyond their worth over the song's indulgent length.
"Little Girl" exemplifies Pierce's knack for juxtaposing lavish instrumentation with extremely depressing lyrics. The song opens with a relatively macho line from the string section before Pierce laments "Sometimes I wish I was dead/ Because only the living can feel the pain." Electric guitars and a fleet of backup singers juice up the song halfway through as Pierce goes into a lengthy, anthemic passage that builds and fades out. At just under four minutes, "Little Girl" is one of the album's most concise and memorable songs, especially compared to the bloated tracks that fill "Sweet Heart's" second half.
Things start to go downhill for the album with "Too Late," a sentimental country?tinged ballad that gets too bogged down in its own syrupy instrumentation and melody to communicate anything memorable to the listener.
As sentimentally charged strings build to an unearned climax, Pierce bemoans "But it's too late, I've made up my mind / Love only shows when there's eyes it can blind." Tracks like this show how Pierce is at his best when he holds back on overt sentimentality and raw emotions, obscuring them behind his meticulous arrangements. Without these obstructions, Pierce's heartfelt melodies can be almost maudlin, as is the case with "Too Late."
"Headin' for the Top Now" is a refreshing change of pace, though it stretches itself too thin over its eight minute length. Fuzzed out guitars and '50sdoowop piano beat out a groove over various synth squelches. Pierce's vocals are charged with personality as he sings over the soupy accompaniment of the rhythm section and synths. However, the song never really builds to any climax or resolves into another form; it chugs along for over eight minutes, and its conclusion is a large relief. While "Hey Jane" had just enough development to keep its indulgent length listenable, "Headin' for the Top Now" doesn't support its duration with anything other than increasingly monotonous riffs.
Unfortunately, "Sweet Heart Sweet Light's" concluding songs are its worst. "Life Is a Problem" has extremely sappy strings that are meant to make the album's tongue?in?cheek lyrics about getting help from Jesus seem ironic. Instead, they just seem contrived, as if Pierce were trying to make a snarky jab at religion by pairing Christian rock lyrics with blithely sentimental strings. The same exact criticism can be leveled at "So Long You Pretty Thing," the album's concluding track.
All in all, "Sweet Heart Sweet Light" is a tough album to summarize. Its best tracks show off everything Spiritualized's finest music has to offer. Swaggering tracks like "I Am What I Am" and "Get What You Deserve" are memorable additions to the group's cannon.
However, one can't help coming away with the album with a cynical attitude, as the glossy production and overblown sentiment of "Sweet Heart Sweet Light" lacks the edge and insight of the band's previous releases. For anyone who feels that way, one listen to "Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space" is the perfect remedy.
