Spiritualized Ladies and Gentlemen…We are Floating in Space [Collector’s Editon] (2009)

From pitchfork.com

“There’s a hole in my arm where all the money goes,” moans Jason Pierce at the start of “Cop Shoot Cop…”, the 17-minute closer of Spiritualized’s third album and lone masterpiece, Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space. His bedraggled voice drips through the words. He’s an addict, but it’s as if he realizes none of it mattered, anyway– there’s no salvation, no redemption, only cold life and sudden death. One cop lives to kill another cop. (Or a junkie survives only long enough to shoot up again.) The world keeps turning. Just like in his opening line, he quotes John Prine: “Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”

Since the 1997 release of Ladies and Gentlemen, Spiritualized have recorded three LPs, a handful of singles and EPs, and two double-disc sets called Complete Works. And the noise-gospel rock sprees that followed Ladies and Gentlemen cemented Spiritualized’s reputation as one of rock’n’roll’s best live spectacles. Pierce has also scored a Harmony Korine film, recorded a solo electronics album, collaborated with Spring Heel Jack, and sculpted a mesmerizing long-form drone record with pianist Matthew Shipp. He also almost died, in 2005 of bilateral pneumonia, only to recover and finish a remarkable return to form– Songs in A&E. Yet Pierce unequivocally reached the height of his recorded powers with Ladies and Gentlemen. Bolder than the term Britpop might suggest, more focused than the term psychedelic might imply, Ladies and Gentlemen is one of the great triumphs of the 70-plus-minute CD era. Alternately chaotic and meticulous, thundering and quivering, Ladies and Gentlemen finds power in conflict– between restraint and excess, addiction and isolation, and ultimately, love and hate.

Like most any critical and commercial success, the record has now been repackaged with extra content– specifically, in an ornate limited run meant for collectors and zealots. Ladies and Gentlemen‘s treatment as an edition of 1,000 numbered box sets from ATP is outrageous and elegant enough to match its contents: Each song comes on an individual black three-inch CD, the discs sealed inside black blister packaging, like the single tablets of a treatment regimen. Two discs of demos and isolated elements from the finished tunes– those lonesome, blue horns blaring through “No God Only Religion”, for instance– get their own package, too, as does a personalized prescription signed by the doctor Jason Pierce himself. The liner notes take the form of lengthy instructions and technical specs for the medicine– how the pills were made, who made them, and how they should be taken. “What is Spiritualized used for?” asks the silver metallic ink. “Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.”

There’s no better way to put it, really. Ladies and Gentlemen is, at its core, an album about wanting something you don’t have until, as “Cop Shoot Cop…” says, it brings you to your knees. Pierce wants to fill that hole in his arm, or– as it were– the hole in his heart. Kate Radley plays keyboards and sings on Ladies and Gentlemen, and she begins the album with that famous telephone call: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space,” her voice delivering horrible news with ruinous calm. Her romance with Pierce had just ended. Four days before Spiritualized were to open for the Verve in England in 1995, she secretly married the headliner’s Richard Ashcroft. “All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away,” Pierce repeats for the album’s first minute. Your heart would hurt, too.

Pierce famously denies that Ladies and Gentlemen has anything to do with Radley, telling The Guardian as late as 2001 that “People have this idea that anyone who writes music is bearing their soul.” He cited “Broken Heart”, in which he admits that he’s too busy to actually have one, as an example of playfulness. These songs were mostly written before they called it quits, he’s said, and, after all, it’s only rock’n’roll. But with very vivid words and visceral sounds, Ladies and Gentlemen expresses the extremes of attachment and separation. “I just don’t know what to do on my own/ All of my thoughts are with you,” Pierce sings. But he’s not just hurt– he’s also angry. His band eventually unloads a rock salvo that feels like a fistfight. The drums roil. The piano pounds. If there ever was a melody, the harmonica’s choked the breath from it. By the next number, he’s practically sobbing over a galactic country drift: “Stay with me/ Smile all the time/ Don’t go.” He’s still addicted to something, and on “Electricity”, he lets us know how good it felt. “I’m playing with fire, if you know what I mean.”

The rub, of course, is that we don’t know what he means. We can only interpret and internalize for ourselves. Maybe it was Radley, or maybe it was the heroin he smoked and the booze he drank. Hell, maybe he was just being an entertainer. But if you don’t know those feelings, the highs of love and the lows of loss, you’ve fared better than most. This sort of emotional ambiguity makes Ladies and Gentlemen an eternal album, as provocative then as it is now. People haven’t stopped loving and losing and hurting yet, and they won’t, of course. These pleasures and pains can be attached to anything. But what makes this ostentatious reissue– the box costs £125.00, or about $190, plus postage– so interesting right now is that it feels like a souvenir forwarded from another era. Ladies and Gentlemen is an extinct breed of album, a production so lavish that you have to think most record label executives would balk or faint at the thought of funding it in 2010. To wit, New Orleans fixture Dr. John is but a session player here, joining a cast of a dozen players, the London Community Gospel Choir, and a high-profile string quartet. (The record is also being reissued as a single disc, with new artwork, and as a 3xCD set without a lot of the pricy trappings of the more extravagant package.)

That spirit is evident on the demos included here as well. On Ladies and Gentlemen, “Cool Waves” is a diorama built with weepy vocals, darting flute, schmaltzy strings, building concert bass drums, and a choir that’s just begging for salvation. But its one-minute demo included in this set seems no more complicated than the demos Pierce made with his schoolmates in 1984, his former band Spacemen 3’s first recordings. If the demo is a Polaroid, the album is Avatar. There’s no way it could have been cheap.

While Ladies and Gentlemen established Spiritualized as one of the supreme bands of the 90s, it was by no means an overwhelming commercial success. It earned album of the year honors from NME in 1997 and placed on year-end charts in The Village Voice, Q, and Uncut. But Ladies and Gentlemen charted only as high as No. 4 in England. In the United States, it’s sold slightly more than 111,000 copies– about 20,000 less than Merriweather Post Pavilion. To wit, Sony Music scrapped its plans for this reissue in America, meaning it’s available only through ATP’s mail-order service. The disc did better by the band’s legacy, one assumes, than it did for any label’s bottom line.

After all, it’s an album mostly without a clear hit single, a massive production better enjoyed as a whole than in bits and pieces. Though Spiritualized eventually released edits, remixes, or reworkings of “I Think I’m in Love”, “Come Together”, and “Electricity”, those songs thrive best in the context of the album– in their original, much more grand iterations. “I Think I’m in Love”, for instance, flows brilliantly from “Come Together” and, eight minutes later, its dénouement shapes the perfect non-introduction to the casual piano of “All of My Thoughts”. In the interim, Pierce reveals the breadth of the band’s ideas and influence. The first half combines Spacemen 3’s LaMonte Young-like 20th century composition (with its growling synthesizer drone), dub, soul (with its thick, stunted bass line), American blues (with its twisted harmonica howls), and folk (Pierce’s subtle autoharp strums). The back half is a sassy, baritone saxophone-backed dialogue between Pierce’s self-confidence and his self-doubt: “I think that I can rock’n’roll,” he sings. “Probably just twisting,” he answers. And on “Come Together”, one of only a few Ladies and Gentlemen tunes you’re likely to still hear live, Pierce fancies himself a young man that’s sad and fucked (a word he manages to use five times in as many minutes here) amid references to suicide, heroin, and busted dreams.

Even “Broken Heart”, the album’s ballad and most beautiful moment, clocks in close to seven minutes. It needs every one of them, too, since the song’s overwhelming sadness depends entirely on its length and its ability to establish an atmosphere. This is an album of emotion and empathy, and it’s hard to capture feelings with a format. That’s what ranks Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space alongside the best art: Jason Pierce and a big band that included his ex-girlfriend and a whole slew of people that soon became his ex-bandmates faithfully render the cycle of loving anything– the innocent exuberance, the bitter rejection, the episodic denial– in 70 perfect minutes. And even if you can’t afford this version of that achievement, you should have it on hand. One day, it’ll come in handy. After all, “Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.”