Sweet Heart Sweet Light
With leader Jason Pierce pushing his vocals closer to the front of the mix in recent years, *Sweet Heart Sweet Light* again finds Spiritualized coming close to accessible pop music in key spots. It provides clarity to a music that previously excelled as an oblique blur. \"Too Late\" cruises near convention, with a gentle folk melody that could pass for a Mojave 3 number. Elsewhere, there\'s still plenty of sonic detail; buzzing fuzz and psychedelic orchestration make \"Get What You Deserve\" a looping narcotic hit that ends in a torrent of feedback. \"Headin\' for the Top Now\" dives deeper into the distorted sonic soup that made Pierce\'s work with Spacemen 3 such a welcome enigma. Weirdest of all is the unexpected team-up with New Orleans\' gumbo-voodoo legend Dr. John for the co-written \"I Am What I Am,\" where both artists find a way to make their presence felt and reach a common ground, where gospel vamps marry Pierce\'s harshest sonic attacks.
Pierce is still using large orchestras and choirs to take his Robert Johnson blues way past the crossroads, to vistas that are as endless as they are empty. He's still singing his own rock'n'roll gospel: Jesus, fast cars, girls named Jane and Mary, pimps, death, fire, freedom, and God all show up, giving life to Pierce's alternate-universe Eden, inhabited by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, self-loathing, and a spitty syringe. He's still his own genre-- this tiny voice elevated by the super-church-sized arrangements in his head. "I want to make music that catches all the glory and beauty and magnificence, but also the intimacy and fragility, all within the space of the same 10 seconds," Pierce has said. It's a mad goal. But it's also an inherently intriguing and universal one, just as ancient myths or Biblical tales can be. Pierce isn't religious, but he uses Christian language and figures as a thematic shorthand. "As you have a conversation about Jesus, you know you're talking to him about how it is to be fallible and question yourself and your morals," he told me. "When I sing, 'Help me, Jesus,' you know I'm not asking for help fixing the fucking car." Such an all-or-nothing attitude is risky, but that's the whole point. Pierce mixed Sweet Heart over eight drawn-out months under something of a drug-induced stupor. But it wasn't the kind of drug-induced stupor Pierce is known for. At the time, he was being hit with experimental chemotherapy treatments to combat a degenerative liver disease. (Three doctors are thanked in the liner notes; Pierce is apparently OK now.) During this album's creation, the singer referred to it as Huh?-- a nod to his jumbled mental state. All of which would make one assume that Sweet Heart would be messy, fucked-up, and completely depressing. That is not the case. This is probably the most uplifting album of his career.- Ryan Dombal Pitchfork.com 8.8/10
Spiritualized's best album since the defining 1997 monument Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space is not so much a drastic transformation as much as an acute refinement, and it also happens to be the most uplifting album of Jason Pierce's career.
It’s been nearly four years since the last Spiritualized LP, but just like Songs in A&E, Sweet Heart, Sweet Light arises from a situation not of Jason Pierce’s choosing. While A&E is named for the Royal London Hospital ward in which he was treated for a nasty, life-threatening bout of pneumonia, Sweet Heart was…
Check out our album review of Artist's Sweet Heart Sweet Light on Rolling Stone.com.
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Sweet Heart Sweet Light opens with a sumptuous, succinct instrumental (Huh?), before diving balls first into a nine-minute glam rock opus (Hey Jane) that’s four minutes longer than it should be. Little Girl opens with the line: “Sometimes I wish that I was dead,” before leading into one of the simplest and best songs J. Spaceman has written in years. If you’re after an analogy for Spiritualized’s career, you could do worse than this opening trio, and the pattern continues throughout.
"Hey Jane" opens Sweet Heart Sweet Light, Spiritualized's seventh full-length album and the first since 2008's Songs in A&E.
The term ‘space rock’ would probably lead to thoughts of Hawkwind for many of us or something of a progressive nature.
<p>Jason Pierce and co's seventh album is very much business as usual… and that's the problem, writes <strong>Kitty Empire</strong></p>
Unlike in the past, when Jason Pierce stirred the pot and made something new, it doesn’t cohere in the way the best Spiritualized albums have.
Jason Pierce turns his suffering into art once again, and the results are as grandiose and powerful as ever, writes <strong>Tim Jonze</strong>
Spiritualized 'Hey Jane' by Spiritualized Spiritualized’s last album, 2008’s Songs in A&E, came with the story of lead singer Jason Pierce’s near-death experience from serious illness. Listening to the album knowing this, it’s almost as though we’re inside his mind as he lays unconscious on his hospital bed, moving through a series of beautifully and
Spiritualized - Sweet Heart Sweet Light review: One of the most accomplished Spiritualized albums.