Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space - Spiritualized (1997)
In the textbook of 20th century rock music, you’ll get to the chapter on “psychedelic rock” pretty early on, where bands attempted in various ways both musical and conceptual to create a little pocket universe a listener could inhabit without the bothe of the real world.
A few chapters later you’ll get to the “Shoegaze” chapter, wherein a small subculture of British bands started using a psychedelic effect of filling absolutely every frequency of the spectrum with as much distortion fuzz as possible, while still managing to sound pretty.
One of the bands that might get mentioned in that shoegaze chapter is Spacemen 3. I’m not a devoted follower but I’d recommend their 1990 record Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To, and not just becuase it’s a god-tier album title.
Spacemen 3 was short-lived. One half of the creative partnership, Jason Pierce, took the recently-new rhythm section and formed Spiritualized, where he proceeded to do a lot of the same work but with a larger sonic pallette and with less of his former bandmate’s love of drone music (that other half, it’s worth mentioning, went by the name of Sonic Boom. so…)
There’s still plenty of shoegazey guitar noise here and there, but the songcraft is more advanced. Organs, sound effects, dance beats, and horn sections flesh out the songs that still try to create that individual space for a listener, and it gives the screaming guitars more weight when they do come in.
It might still basically be music to take drugs to, but it’s on an upward path and Spiritualized would keep making great records for some time.
