Spiritualized: Big British rock to tug the heart strings

Spiriualized's Jason Pierce

There's a whiff of brit rock revival in the air. Blur isn't getting back together after all*, but the band announced a massive retrospective (box set ) of its 21-year history. Jarvis Cocker is out touring with Pulp again. (check them out on Jimme Fallon last week.)

And this month saw the release of Spiritualized's 7th record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light.

What always struck me as great about British rock bands -- through the mid and lat '90s especially -- was the way they could do big productions but still make the music sound vital and cool, not just simply polished. No matter how much added value they got out of the studio, the music was still rock. It had attitude to spare, awesomely loud guitar playing (Blur's Graham Coxon is still among my favorite guitar players of all time) and wasn't nearly as sloppy as a lot of the indie coming out of the states.

Since Spiritualized's masterful 1997 record, Ladies and Gentlemen, We are Floating in Space, band leader Jason Pierce has done the same. His music blends droning shoe-gaze and fuzzy guitars with big gospel choirs and Motown production. He is simultaneously a whiny indie guitarist and a Phil Spector-like wizard of his very own wall of sound. Like his British rock peers, he never shies away from the big gesture.

Sweet Heart Sweet Light finds Pierce back at those sounds that make up the band's last record, 2008's Sounds in A&E. This time, there is something simple about the entire approach. There are a lot of fmiliar sounds on Sweet Heart... There are jangly '60s rock sounds like "Hey Jane" and the R&B, string section tinged "Little Girl." There are plaintive ballads like "Freedom" and "Too Late." And there's the just plain beautiful "So Long You Pretty Thing" which begins with a duet between Pierce and his 11-year-old daughter, Poppy.

What makes the record a great listen is that through the big numbers, over that wall of sound and droning guitars, Pierce is not a great singer at all.  He has virtually no range or power. But on a record that is overly concerned with life's brevity (I think death and mortality figure in almost every song -- Pierce fought off a life-threating illness in 2005 and it's hard not to hear the reverberations in his music since),  the fragile quality of Pierce's melodies just works.

As simple and almost sentimental as he can be sometimes, Pierce is able to steer clear of sounding sappy. In fact, even at it's most derivative moments, Sweet Heart Sweet Light sounds definitively authentic, not at all dated.

* Update Aug. 14 Damon Albarn reportedly left the band during a recording session with William Orbit, but the band got back together to close the Olympics on Sunday, Aug. 12. It might be their last show ever, or not.... who knows.