Spiritualized Everything Was Beautiful LP

BrooklynVegan Top 50 Albums of 2022 - Rated 41/50!

The ninth studio album from Spiritualized comes 30 years after the 1992 debut album Lazer Guided Melodies, and is the follow up to 2018's And Nothing Hurt.

During lockdown of 2020, J Spaceman (aka Jason Pierce) would walk through an empty "Roman London" where the world was "full of birdsong and strangeness," trying to make sense of all the music playing in his head at the time. The mixers and mixes of his new record weren't working out yet. Spaceman plays 16 different instruments on Everything Was Beautiful which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home.

He also employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Eventually the mixes got there and Everything Was Beautiful was achieved.

The result is some of the most "live" sounding recordings that Spiritualized have released since the Live At The Albert Hall record of 1998, around the time of Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space.

All these layers, all these details, the year-long mixes, the making sense of it all and the lives lived within these lyrics; for somebody so famously unconfident of his own abilities, isn't this a punishing thing to keep doing? "Yeah, but I like what I do," explains Spaceman. "There's a line from Jonathan Meades that's about having all the attributes to being an artist. 'Paranoia, vanity, selfishness, egotism, sycophancy, resentment, moral nullity and more idiot than idiot savant.' And that's what it feels like, this kind of thing. You're your own worst enemy and biggest supporter. There's a 'Of course this is worth it. It's me' and then this kind of deep doubt of 'What the fuck is this all about?' And then 'Why is it important?' and then knowing there's no easy answer. But it's there. I know it's there."

The opening track "Always Together With You" is a reworking / supercharging of a track originally demoed in 2014. This new version is a perfect Spiritualized song; a breathtaking, hard edged, psychedelic pop tune where themes of high romance and space travel are paired with characters who "thought your life came in a bag of white sniffed through a silver tube." In one of the most sublime refrains of the band's career, the backing singers call out "if you gotta lonely heart too."

J Spaceman's latest opus is gloriously satisfying and self-referential, refining his orchestral space rock with alchemical power.

It's one of the liveliest albums Spiritualized have made...Everything Was Beautiful is delirious and exciting, a perfect distilment of the best parts of the band's various phases that feels reinvigorated and new.

The album draws parallels to Spiritualized's 1997 masterpiece, Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space, from the prescription meds cover art to the whispered intro to its scope which includes multiple studios and dozens of musicians. Clearly Pierce knew this one had the stuff to hold up to the comparisons. Everything is beautiful. May J Spaceman float in space forever.