Give Me Vonnegut Reason

The editor of the MusicOMH website changed my score out of 5 for this review.  They do that a lot.  I don't mind, it's their site, but more importantly, I don't like the idea of giving a score, and do it grudgingly.  So, you can guess whether this was marked half a star up, or half a star down, if you want to.  Kills some time, eh.  The grave is on the horizon.

SPIRTUALIZED – EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL (Bella Union)

If you want to describe Spiritualized’s new album in one word – perhaps you’re playing a parlour game at the birthday of a broadsheet music reviewer, or talking to a fourteen-year-old who skips the “boring intro” on a ninety-second TikTok video – that word would be “layered”. Every song on Everything Was Beautiful is beautifully put together, and there always seems to be another part to discover, another sound to pick out of the dense arrangements, another overdub to unearth somewhere in the depths of the mix. The record is a minor miracle of construction, and you get the impression that every sound was percolating in Jason “J Spaceman” Pierce’s head Brian Wilson-style long before it was captured on tape (especially once you discover that this album uses material from eleven different studios plus Pierce’s home recordings). However, this intense layering is also the album’s Achilles heel, and there are times when the music feels over-rich and stodgy, like a nightmare where you’re trying to run but are mired ankle-deep in suet and old Rolling Stones records.

The cover features pharmacological art by Mark Farrow harking back directly to Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space – and why not, it is one of the greatest sleeves of the 1990s after all – and in the opening moments you might fear that this album is simply a direct beat-for-beat retread of Spiritualized’s most famous record, like a Tubular Bells II for the melancholically medicated: the album begins with a direct analogue to Ladies & Gentlemen’s title track, with a sultry female whispering the album’s title, some quiet space bleeps and one of those stately, Pachelbel-flavoured circling chord sequences that come with a strong whiff of pained self-pity. Thankfully, this is just to ease us in gently and the track soon shows its own character, ratcheting into a thunking, reverby hymnal paean like an overweight Phil Spector backing track, behind which a lovely miasma of strings swirls and eddies. The lyrics adapt the hoary old Brill building “I’ll be whatever you want” formula, with lines like “If you want a radio, I would be a radio for you”, which get the point across (although you can’t take this stuff seriously once you’ve heard The Divine Comedy’s parody on 'If...').

A good few years ago, in his movie column, Nick Lowe - no, not that one - posited that Hollywood scientists were hard at work, trying to create a film constructed entirely of endings. As well as turning out to be incredibly prescient of our era of multi-movie adaptations of single books, and apparently infinitely expanding Marvel narratives which constantly climax yet never actually conclude, it’s a handy description of the average Spiritualized track. Most of the songs on this album seem to exist purely as delivery systems for extended outros, from the Lou Reed chug of 'Best Thing You Never Had', with a delightful beery trombone solo, to the bluesy trudge of 'Let It Bleed', to the drunken duck sax blurt freak-out that constitutes two-thirds of 'The A Song (Laid In Your Arms)', and which sounds gloriously like three Art Ensemble Of Chicago tracks playing at once.  'Mainline', the album’s high-point, just sounds like a long coda to a song that’s been edited out, an organic and euphoric built on some simple melodic material including the delicious Beach Boys purr of a bass harmonica. 

The album’s title might reference “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”, a line from Kurt Vonnegut’s pacifist sci-fi novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Whilst Vonnegut’s hero was “unstuck in time”, Spiritualized are very much the opposite, each song taking a fragment of pop history – a dewy-eyed Patsy Cline melody, a Velvets lick, a ‘70s gospel horn refrain – and sticking to it, repeating and developing it until the tape runs out (or the drugs wear off). It’s as strong an approach as it ever was, and if nothing on Everything Was Beautiful feels truly essential to anyone with the Spiritualized back catalogue, it’s also a glowing example of their aesthetic. As the Arvo Pärt strings and mournful tolling bell at the end of 'I’m Coming Home Again' fade away, you’ll be happy to go back and start listening to all these endings once again.

Oto Trader

I very much like this album.  I'm not even sure why.  I feel as though it should be annoying.  But it's not.  It's great.

DESTROYER - LABYRINTHITIS (Bella Union)

If you were half-listening to Destroyer’s thirteenth album, you’d think it was decent. It‘s relatively tuneful, and nods towards some very trendy mid-eighties production techniques, somewhat in the style of Cut Copy, with some bonus disco rhythms and Art of Noise chunky beats keeping the party perky. Yeah, well done; great job; let’s move on. The more attention you pay, however, the more you discover everything about this album is somehow delightfully wrong. The full listening experience is perplexing, intriguing, sometimes perhaps infuriating, but rarely less than intoxicating. 

Musically, all the individual elements make sense, but tend to be placed together with artful abandon, joints and seams left on display. The opening few seconds of the album are an absolute rhythmic car crash, before 'It’s In Your Heart Now' coalesces into a goth amble, melancholic synth pads wreathing everything in a thick fog, before a quietly euphoric Manzanera guitar soars in at the three-minute mark. June is even more off-kilter. It starts like a pastiche of an Alexander O’Neal jam, Dan Bejar’s vocal peeping through lush plastic foliage of syn-toms, slinky guitar and twinkling keys, with fragments of egregious slap bass popping up unexpectedly and unpredictable synth noises and muted trumpet bimble about in the middle distance; but the strangest element is a low fruity beat poet voice which is dropped in near the end, apparently in mid-sentence, with the kind of self-assured ham-fisted edit that Fall albums had whenever the producer let Mark E Smith near the mixing desk. 

Considering this knowing sonic confection, the vocal delivery is suitably arch. There are moments of simple, melodic intimacy, but these are generally balanced by a snide camp acidity, as if Colin Vearncombe from Black had been taken over by Quentin Crisp. On occasion an elegantly blasted romanticism a la Hefner can be discerned, but a more frequent reference point would be the ironic carnival patter of Dave Couse from A House (but with extra irony). Strangest of all is the theatrically arcane intonation of lead single 'Tintoretto, It’s For You', which opens with the hammy exclamation “Do you remember the mythic beast?”, like we’re watching the Aphrodite’s Child panto: this is Bejar as trickster imp, who will ask you three riddles, and pick your pockets whilst you consider the answers.

It’s lyrically where this album is most original and idiosyncratic, though.  Sententious quips like “You’d pay good money for a million dollar view” could have come from the pen of Art Brut’s Eddie Argos, whereas poetic, painterly images such as “You lose your umbrella to the sideways rain” are more like extracts from The Blue Aeroplanes’ spidery notebooks. Elsewhere you’ll find gnostic nonsense, and the koans of potty-mouthed Zen masters: on how many albums cold you learn both that “Time and space combine and remain meaningless” and “Snow angles are just fucking idiots”? Typically the title track, where you might expect to find answers, is an instrumental, a lovely snaking synth bass overlaid with a collage of repitched vocal fragments and wordless child samples, sounding like both Boards of Canada and Jean-Michel Jarre’s best, though least known, album Zoolook.

The album ends beautifully. 'The States' is all misty-eyed keyboards and bouncy drums like The Beloved without the 3am ecstasy glow, or forgotten ‘80s act Kon Kan without the wacky-uncle wink, but the last two and a half minutes consist solely of echoing distorted notes stretching back into an extreme De Chirico perspective. Just when you think this is the end, 'The Last Song' arrives, a little ditty with the facepaint sincerity Lou Reed managed on Goodnight Ladies. It’s lovely and moving even as it apparently says nothing. The subject of the song moves to LA and we see them “fake say” hello and goodbye, but it’s hard to say whether the track is snide or affectionate. Maybe it’s both - after all, as June notes, “You have to look at it from all angles, says the Cubist judge”.

The title Labyrinthitis might bring to mind a vast maze, which is fitting because this album gets more mystifying the deeper in you venture. It’s actually a disease of the inner ear, which is even more apposite: this music gets into your head and makes you feel dizzy.