2. Songs In A&E (2008)

For an artist that’s never really fit into any mainstream narrative, Songs In A&E was fairly overshadowed, or at least unquestionably defined, by its specific narrative. During the time between the 2003 release of Amazing Grace and when Songs In A&E finally saw the light in 2008, Jason Pierce almost died after experiencing a whole slew of issues at once, including pneumonia that pushed him into respiratory failure. The album title is actually derived from the time he spent in the Accidents & Emergency ward. So, it all seemed very obvious — the death imagery on Songs In A&E, a tangible fixation on mortality, these all seemed fitting results from Pierce’s near-death experience in 2005. The only thing is that he wrote most of the album before all that happened.

Credit it to prescience, then, but Songs In A&E feels like it earns its gospel elements and meditations on mortality more so than any other Spiritualized album. It’s simultaneously ragged and simpler in a way that Amazing Grace sought while reinstating the dramatic production flourishes that made it feel like Spiritualized. Many of these songs started on acoustic guitar and still do, so it feels even more emphatic when the chorus of “Soul On Fire” — one of the most unabashedly sweet and poppy melodies and lyrics Pierce has written — hits, or when the marimba embellishments of “Baby I’m Just A Fool” pull it headlong into violin-lead freakouts at its conclusion.

So maybe it’s a product of writing a story back onto the album based on circumstances that only partially altered the final product, but Songs In A&E feels like an outlier in the Spiritualized catalogue for its personal resonance and its willingness to feel broken down. It doesn’t hide Pierce’s experiences in volumes of reverb and effects, or in dozens of horns and strings. The arrangements are there, but they’re smaller, deployed differently, intended to build not to overwhelm. The result is an album where you feel like you can hear Pierce really striving for the big moments, really earning them, whether that means fighting his way out of a hospital bed or from three chords on an acoustic guitar to the sort of orchestral outro he used to start songs with. It might not be the most typical Spiritualized album, but it remains one of their most engaging.