Album Of The Week: Spiritualized Sweet Heart Sweet Light

Spiritualized have never recorded a bad album. Depending on your feelings about Amazing Grace, they've never recorded one that's less than great. (That one had "Hold On," so I'm on the pro-Amazing Grace side of that particular divide.) Ever since the band formed, Jason Pierce, the only constant member, has hit on a style that just works every time: Fragile hymns to lovesickness and addiction, sung in a disaffected monotone, and built up with so many waves of lovingly arranged instruments and expansive production techniques that they sound like cathedrals of light. With Spiritualized, Pierce has taken the nodded-out drug drones he made with Spacemen 3 and found the cold emptiness and longing that was at those songs' emotional core, pushing them out to the front for everyone to see. Sweet Heart Sweet Light, Spiritualized's new one, is about almost dying; Pierce recorded it after suffering a life-threatening illness and going through chemotherapy to treat it. But then, every Spiritualized album is about almost dying, or feeling almost dead. And so Sweet Heart Sweet Light's real distinction is that it's the Spiritualized album that makes Pierce's desperation sound grander than anything he's done since the stone classic Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space.