It’s been six years since Spiritualized dropped the roundly acclaimed Sweet Heart Sweet Light, making for the English ensemble’s widest gap between albums. But And Nothing Hurt finds Jason Pierce and collaborators breaking that drought in robust form, revisiting their signature spectrum of sweeping chamber pop and swaggering rock ‘n’ roll. Pierce is Spiritualized’s only constant across all eight albums, and he had already been a cult hero for his role in Spacemen 3.
That prodigious discography didn’t mean that the new record was any easier to make, however. “It was done over a long period of time,” admits Pierce by phone from England. “My initial intention was to record a big band session, like a Ray Charles/Columbia Studios session. But I found when I started that I didn’t have the songs to do it.”
So he holed up with his laptop and stubbornly taught himself the finer points of modern home recording, ducking out to the nearest studio when had the money to record extras like drums, strings and horns.
“I always fall into the same hole,” he says, as frank as ever. “I keep saying I don’t want to do it again, but every time I’ve done it on my own, I obsess over things. I feel like there must be an easier way.”
Longtime fans of the band should appreciate And Nothing Hurt even before the opening track, ‘A Perfect Miracle’, has finished. The song’s lullaby-ish start, gradual build and eventual swell of orchestration and overlapping vocals circles back to the opening title track of the band’s 1997’s masterpiece, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.
“I missed the similarity between [them],” Pierce confesses. “It never occurred to me until people started pointing it out. The only way [‘Miracle’] seemed to work is if it got bigger. Every track on the album’s got the maximum number of recorded tracks, which I think is 260-something. I can’t stop filling all this space.”
Watch the clip for ‘I’m Your Man’ by Spiritualized below
While it took him a while to settle up on that ideal album opener, he always knew it was going to end with ‘Sail On Through’, another full-bodied crescendo that this time culminates in a surprise smattering of Morse code.
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“I like the way that it’s the international distress signal,” he says. “It seemed like a real match for the song.” When he put words down in Morse, they reminded him of foreign-language records that historically have made him want to learn their meaning. A touch just as lovely as that fluttering Morse is the adoring mention of Big Star’s classic ‘September Gurls’ on ‘Let’s Dance’. But that reference only manifested after Pierce realised that his song resembled Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’, a pop standard that’s been sung by Sinatra and similar heavy hitters.
It seems like people, especially at my age, put out records just to get back on the road – or to relive past glories. The world doesn’t need another bad record.
Other highlights on And Nothing Hurt include the archetypal road song ‘Here It Comes (The Road) Let’s Go’ and the nearly eight-minute ‘The Morning After’, which evokes such past Spiritualized rave-ups as ‘Electricity’. But again, all the album’s widescreen rewards came only after an arduous creative process.
“I really wanted to make these songs complete,” says Pierce. “There’s this unwritten rule in rock ‘n’ roll that the older you get, your albums don’t have to be good. I really felt under great pressure to make something that was worthy of being released.”
For that reason, he even talked at times about this being the final Spiritualized album. Not because he wanted to retire, but because he wanted to up the stakes enough to craft something truly of lasting value.
“Part of it was to put further pressure on myself to make something that was worthy,” he confirms. “I never wanted to stop making music, but I wanted to throw all the strings in and all this information, and it kind of drives me crazy. I find myself alone, just obsessing about these things.” He also suffered from “crises of no self-belief.”
Listening to some of his favourite music from the past only made him want to work harder. “Now I listen to the music I love and it fills me with a kind of ‘What’s the point?’ [feeling],” he explains, “because it’s already been said so eloquently. So it puts this massive pressure on me to create something that’s worthy. It seems like people, especially at my age, put out records just to get back on the road – or to relive past glories. The world doesn’t need another bad record. It feels like I’d be cheating myself if I went that route.”
Every track on the album’s got the maximum number of recorded tracks, which I think is 260-something. I can’t stop filling all this space.
Catching himself at one point, Pierce says, “I feel like I’m complaining too much.” But his meticulous quality control is key to the immersive, wowing grandeur of so many Spiritualized albums, all the way back to 1992’s Lazer Guided Melodies. “People say, ‘You’ve made eight albums, why can’t you make another?’” he adds. “‘Just throw it together and put it out.’” But that’s never been his way.
Because of the protracted process of making the new album, Pierce isn’t sure when the band might return to Australian for another tour. “But we will,” he promises. Returning just once more to his exacting vision for the gloriously realised And Nothing Hurt, he concludes, “I didn’t feel any fulfilment from not chasing all the possibilities – and chasing some of those possibilities away. Seeing where each song’s gonna go. I think it’s certainly a better album for doing that.”
And Nothing Hurt is out Friday, September 27 through Bella Union / Inertia.
