1. Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (1997)
To be honest, there are rankings in this list that could quite possibly vacillate from day to day. Most of Spiritualized’s material is on similar footing, but maybe someday Amazing Grace will strike me in another way, or I’ll decide Sweet Heart Sweet Light refined and improved upon its predecessor Songs In A&E. This is not the case with Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. That was always destined to be number one. Because Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is a perfect album.
When all the major ’90s British bands were putting out their generation-defining works in the middle of the decade, whether it be Oasis’ first two records or Blur’s Parklife or Pulp’s Different Class, Spiritualized was putting out Pure Phase. Pierce only joined up when everyone was doing the darker or more excessive follow-ups — Be Here Now, Blur, The Verve’s Urban Hymns, and Ladies and Gentelmen all came out in 1997. Pulp followed with This Is Hardcore in 1998. But Pierce seems outside of this context, perhaps because he’d already been around so long, perhaps because he issued his own definitive work only in this “excessive follow-up” mold, without the streamlined pop predecessor that’s supposed to serve as an entry point.
Ladies And Gentlemen should be a big shuddering mess based on how it appears on paper. Instead, everything here feels absolutely pivotal. Each extra guitar line or added bunch of horns or bonus minute of grungey squalor feels like it contributes to an immaculate whole. Every element of Spiritualized is on display: free jazz (“The Individual”), screeching noise meltdowns (“Cop Shoot Cop”), spacey bliss (“Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space”), trippily pulsating rock (“I Think I’m In Love”), heartbroken songs that go orchestral pop (“Broken Heart”) or blend it with shoegaze (“Stay With Me”). The title track combines, of all things, Elvis references and one of Pierce’s gentlest melodies over guitars processed to the point of sounding like alien whale songs. “Come Together” takes a ’60s paean for peace and turns it on its head, making it maybe sinister but at least snide, a choir’s evocation of the title repeatedly punctuated by paranoid horn bursts that eventually rip the song open into a headlong conclusion.
That act, the ripping, seems crucial to this album, which may seem paradoxical since, even at its noisiest, Ladies And Gentlemen is meticulously orchestrated and intentional. That’s the point though — with this album, more than any other, Pierce ripped open the paradox of Spiritualized, the simultaneous drive towards redemption or nihilism, the equal reliance on pop melodies or noise instrumentals, and stitched them back together into one big masterpiece. If there is a unifying term for the myriad focuses of Spiritualized, it’s that Pierce’s music is always sonically and thematically about altered states, whether it’s gospel crescendoes chasing spiritual redemption or psychedelia and drug binges chasing transcendence. Ladies And Gentleman We Are Floating In Space combines all of that seamlessly. The experience of listening to it is itself an altered state.
