I'm loathe to call any album a summation of an artist's career-- that reeks of lazy criticism-- but Songs in A&E is certainly Spiritualized's best work in 10 years. All of Jason Pierce's fascinations of the past 20-plus years appear here-- we'll get to 'em soon enough-- in a truly syncretic, muted, and beautiful way. And there's something rooted and grounded about Songs in A&E. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in place.
This is Pierce's first record in five years-- the delay was, in part, due to him being hospitalized with double pneumonia, i.e. he was really fucked-up and tethered to machines to keep him alive. (In the UK, the ER is called the Accident & Emergency ward-- hence the title.) Not surprisingly, Pierce's ordeal colors the sound and tone of the record-- "Death Take Your Fiddle", essentially another update of the traditional "O Death", seems to sample the sound of a respirator-- although Pierce has stated in interviews that the album was already more than half-finished when he took ill.
Lyrically, as Pierce as wont to do, there are love songs, drug songs, and God songs-- typically, they're all those things at once at times. Pierce's protagonist on these tunes is world-weary ("So hard to fight when you're losing/ I got a little fire in my soul," he says on "I Gotta Fire") and sounds all the more so in Pierce's lovely croaking/cracking vocals. What saves the songs from woe-is-me solipsism and overarching sentimentality is a well-hidden but ironic sense of humor. Well, that and the fact that the music itself is awesome. The key song is "Borrowed Your Gun", which begins like a typical junkie lament with "Daddy I'm sorry" but continues into murder ballad territory with "I borrowed your gun again/ Shot up your family."
A few songs on Songs in A&E run on a bit too long-- this is a Spiritualized record, after all-- and from some angles a few arrangements can sound hokey. The big rocker "I Gotta Fire" is like the Stone Roses covering Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather", but even on lesser tracks, a delightful oboe or a crazy lyric or a swelling gospel chorus swoops in and gives you a reason to replay the track. Pierce is again walking mopey, orchestral, minimalist rock out to the margins of taste and messing with your head all over the place. And this time he does it with a shit-ton of sonic subtlety. (Take those earbuds out and pop this one on the stereo.)
Pierce has never seemed so in control of his aesthetic, rather than controlled by it like some sort of drone-rock fetishist. The props dropped here are super obvious, and meant to be so, whether to Daniel Johnston with the "Funeral Home" refrain or to Kris Kristofferson with a quotation from "Me & Bobby McGee". Prior releases each had enjoyable but indulgent bliss-out tracks that went on a long time, but on A&E the out sounds are distilled into six miniature numbered tracks each called "Harmony". These serve as a glue holding the album together, and while they're "spacey," their brevity keeps the record on solid terrestrial ground. The other songs are vessels for contrasting ideas: la-la melodies vs. wah-wah guitar, strings vs. brass, country licks vs. Free Design-style vocals, and simple structures vs. lush arrangements. These oppositional concepts overlap more than ever on A&E, but the album only sounds muddled or muddied during a few clunky transitions. And weirdly, those serve to make you more aware than ever of the greatness of what he's doing the rest of the time.
