George wanted to know if I was okay. He was the first of any of them to talk to me. I fingered the cheap plastic band that circled my wrist, and then wriggled my toes, which were kept warm in hospital-issue socks with gripped undersides. I eyed an overweight woman in her mid-30s. She'd watched me as I slept, and now she was following me around, refusing to let me out of her sight.
I know how I got there, for the most part, but patient reader (no pun intended), your imagination will serve you fine. Just know that I woke up with the sad zombies-- these shell-shocked men and women, most of them middle-aged, who drifted through the ward like ghosts, their minds lost in the past, or perhaps an alternate present. All I know is, they were neither here nor there.
But George, the muscular black guy with the afro and dated flannel shirt, was closer to here than there. And he wanted to know if I was okay. It took the strength of a scream just to whisper, "Yes." Of course, I wasn't, but I was pretty sure I was better off than anyone else there. Not better, mind you, but better off. That is, my muscles weren't made rigid by anti-schizophrenic drugs. I wasn't drooling. And whenever I spoke, I did so with another person.
It might seem like a depressing time. Instead, it was revelatory, even uplifting. The same could be said for listening to Spiritualized's latest, Let It Come Down. With all of Jason Pierce's tormented vocals, with his talk of addiction and recovery, of fractured love, of the burden of religion on the soul; with all this, you'd expect him to be confined to a straitjacket. But rather, he manages to make it all sound glorious, as if these rock-bottom moments are equally responsible for the beauty of living-- or of not dying.
Admittedly, some of that glorious feeling comes from the choir, or the brass band, or the orchestra-- which, all told, amounts to about 100 contributors to Pierce's vision. Meanwhile, Pierce has ditched nearly the entire lineup from 1997's ambitious Ladies and Gentleman, We are Floating in Space, but surprisingly enough, the sound here isn't drastically different, just slightly more lush and refined.
The caterwauling opener, "On Fire," exhibits this point well enough. A rapid, twinkling piano starts the track off, followed by buzzing guitars and then Pierce's voice, which tears through the carpe diem lyrics with ample bile: "Let's see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax on our wings/ Let's see how fast we can go before our eyes can't follow the road." But he's soon accompanied by a choir and blasting horns, which propel the sound to almost overwhelming heights.
The following number, "Do It All Over Again," is the opposite-- a simple, uncluttered song. Horns are again used here, as are faint background voices, but sparingly; the song is mostly comprised of a crisp acoustic guitar, rumbling drums, and Pierce's more relaxed vocals. "I love you like I love the sun in the morning," he sings. "But I don't think a few words of mine are going to make you change your mind/ And I'm going to spend the day in bed and I'm planning on sleeping my life away." Somehow, these modest elements combine for one of his finest moments yet.
The rest of the album lands somewhere between these two tracks. "Don't Just Do Something" takes the slow-building gospel route, while "The Twelve Steps" starts with heavy riffs and raucous horns before halting to a bluesy, siren-laden interlude reminiscent of Ladies and Gentleman's 17-minute closer "Cop Shoot Cop" (which, sadly, doesn't have a counterpart here).
"The Straight and the Narrow," a slow, simple ballad about a failure to beat addiction-- "I don't fall off the wagon, you know/ I take a dive and go as deep as I can go/ Don't hold your breath because I'm coming up slow this time"-- is yet another epiphany. But so, too, is the 10-minute epic, "Won't Get to Heaven (The State I'm In)," which overflows with strings and choir voices, then shifts at the halfway mark into a funk groove-- all without losing a step.
Granted, a few tracks here require perhaps too much patience, or never peak as one might expect, or are overburdened with sound. But even these lesser tracks contain the simple, yet stunning affirmations that make Pierce so engaging. And these moments are revelatory not because of what they say about him, but because they have the power to trigger similar affirmations of our own: yes, they rolled me into the ward in a wheelchair, even though my legs weren't the problem. But I walked out the next day.
