Spiritualized, Amazing Grace
There aren’t many places nowadays where you could expect to not hear garage rock music. All round the world kids are growing their hair, learning how to ‘play’ a guitar, and getting signed on a forty million pound deal to Spanner Records, Detroit. One of the places you would hope you could find solace would be on a Spiritualized album; their last two albums, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’ and ‘Let It Come Down’, both included huge orchestras, took years to complete, and were unanimously praised by the press for their huge sound, which was removed from anything else around at the time.
It’s hard to understand, then, why ‘Amazing Grace’ is the sound of the band imitating – on not all, but a number of the tracks – the sound of every other backwards-thinking rock band currently clogging up alternative music. Perhaps Jason Pierce has secretly harboured a desire to write these kind of songs for years, and only dared to try now the ‘rock revolution’ is in full flow. The more cynical would suggest that the band are simply aiming for commercial success. It might all be a sick joke. Whichever is true, it’s fair to say that, whilst endearingly schizophrenic in its genre-jumping – like Daniel Bedingfield, but with a normal sized face and any musical ability – Spiritualized just don’t do garage rock very well. Tracks 1, 2 and 5 are virtually interchangeable, and they lack the energy required to make this kind of music listenable.
Thankfully, then, around the half-way point, the album moves into a happy compromise between the new and the old sounds. ‘The ballad of Richie Lee’ is orchestral, has great percussion, but isn’t as polished as it might have been on previous albums, giving it an identity away from older Spiritualized material without forgetting what made the band so praiseworthy in the first place. And on ‘Cheapster’, the band’s unlikely aim of producing a quality rock song finally transpires; an excellent organ riff and a running time of just over two minutes sees the track succeed.
‘Amazing Grace’, in itself, is not a bad album. And it’s not entirely detached from previous Spiritualized work; the faux-religious lyrics, the hymnal sound of some of the songs, and the appearance of a choir on a couple of the tracks ensure that fans won’t feel totally lost. Instead, they’ll probably just feel slightly disappointed that what was a brave gamble by the band isn’t, it seems, where Spiritualized should be heading.
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