5. Pure Phase (1995)

Pure Phase is no misnomer. The second album under the Spiritualized moniker, it is a transitional work, coming at a time where Pierce was actually playing with the group’s name, attributing this album to Spiritualized Electric Mainline, and claiming that they had been known as Spiritualized Lazer Guided Melodies. It is also perhaps the moment where Pierce was most fascinated with straight noise and ambience, sandwiching a more traditional song here and there amongst ten minutes of droning synths and guitars so drenched with effects as to no longer represent the sound of an instrument, but rather seeming to capture the sensation of some imagined sound. Like if waves breaking upon a beach were made of dissipating storm clouds rather than the ocean.

If you want an album to have feel, essence, Pure Phase is great, loaded with soundscapes that can feel alternatively expansive enough to lose yourself in or propulsive enough to take you somewhere specific, which ultimately means it’s formless enough for you to write your own meaning onto it. What that also means is that, aside from a few pivotal hinge points — such as “Lay Back In the Sun,” one of Spiritualized’s best songs — this is not a very song-driven affair, and could feel less focused as a result. Anyone who knows anything about Pierce’s control-freak tendencies can tell that’s probably not the case — the brief “Born Never Asked,” conjures worlds in two minutes, a mournful violin, and layers of distorted sound that bleed into “Electric Mainline,” which is another almost eight minutes of repeated melodies and drone for a reason, not just for druggy aimlessness. The last eighteen minutes are mainly instrumental and spacey, seemingly unrefined and drifting on the surface but in reality crucially paced, so the empty oscillations of “Pure Phase” pay off in the lachrymose strings of “Spread Your Wings,” and then, with just two minutes left in closer “Feel Like Goin’ Home,” a definitive guitar downstroke ushers in Pierce’s voice, clear amongst the noise, offering a note of resolution at the album’s end.

Nevertheless, the specificity of the Pure Phase experience precludes it from standing out amongst the Spiritualized albums that came later, those that managed to wed “album as experience” with “album stocked with damn good songs,” and may sideline it as a remnant of early, shoegaze-inflected Spiritualized most appealing to diehards.