Spiritualized®* – Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space

Let's get the façade thing out of the way.

The packaging of this album continues the modus operandi of Spacemen 3 leading into Spiritualized: "take drugs to make music for taking drugs." Of course this veers it more into the prescribed realm as oppose to taking medicinal matters into your own hands. But if you see this album as purely for its packaging, you are missing the point and the milestone.

Musically, this is a crossroads album. The overall tone is still neo-psychedelic and noise-based. And yet there is a slickness feel to it. There are horns and strings and the feel is like pop music of the 1960s. But there is definitely a contemporary feel in of the sounds and the way it is layered. It is almost like if Phil Spector were reproducing a Blur track that was originally produced by Stephen Street, which was based on a recording session with William Orbit at the helm. But furthermore, it shows a musical maturity of Jason Pierce (J. Spaceman) where he is no longer just regurgating old music. He is finally heading to make his own music. (Then came "Let It Come Down")

Lyrically, I always hear it as a breakup/breakup recovery album. The means to forget love's bittersweet taste is through, appropriately enough, drugs. The end is a strange headtrip where it goes into melancholy, deep depression, resolution, hyperactivity, rashness and back to melancholy. Musically it's a big moodswing as well but it's the lyrics that explains it. After all, you can draw all kinds of conclusions if the entire album were made like "The individual" and "No God only religion." It something that I knew would explain what was going on inside my head and heart whenever a relationship ended, especially one where I didn't think it would.

And I still croon with deep sadness to the last verse of "Cop shoot cop"