Spiritualized review – drone-rock's dark magus orchestrates a transcendent wig-out

The air of all-too-keenly felt mortality that coils throughout Spiritualized’s latest album, And Nothing Hurt, is no mere affectation. Once the seemingly invincible leader of Spacemen 3 – drone-rock hedonists who proudly “took drugs to make music to take drugs to” – Spiritualized major-domo Jason Pierce has of late weathered near-fatal bouts of liver disease and double pneumonia. He has even intimated that And Nothing Hurt marks a last hurrah for the group.

So when he walks on stage in darkness – following after the rest of his five-piece band, full string and horn sections, a tympanist and a gospel choir – takes a seat stage-right, hunches over his guitar in front of a music stand and croaks a mournful Hold On in a voice frail and sunken, it is hard not to fear that tonight we are witnessing his final throes. The lyrics underscore the elegiac tenor: “Hold on to those you hold dear. Death cannot take what you’ve already lost.”

But then a narcotic guitar lick slithers in, the expanded Spiritualized arkestra swells, and the spotlights rise to reveal Pierce in a baggy white T-shirt, drainpipe jeans and shades (worn indoors, under a mop of lank hair), looking for all the world like, well, every twentysomething dropout Spacemen 3 obsessive. Lazarus-like, his voice is now sharp and sinewy, like acid-era Lennon, and is raised aloft by the choir as they join him on Come Together. It’s a great, swaggering blues lent infernal heft by the horns, the strings, the voices, and the percussionist hammering tympani with abandon.

Pierce swings between these roles – the weary, worn traveller of the soul and the dark drone-rock magus – several times tonight. It’s a turn in the latter guise, On the Sunshine, that is the night’s most electrifying, its vagabond rumble culminating in a celestial wig-out involving two drummers in full-on meltdown, guitarists attempting to communicate with UFOs via feedback, and even the choir getting wild.

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But it is Pierce’s heartbreaking loser-guided symphonies that deliver the most substance. From primitive monochord beginnings, Pierce has long since grown into an expert melodic craftsman, and I’m Your Man, from the new album, is exquisite. It sounds like Abbey Road-era Beatles attempting southern soul; it soars, but the lyrics find the artist also known as J Spaceman earthbound, acknowledging his faults (“wasted, loaded, permanently folded”) but “doing the best that I can”. The romance of the rock’n’roll wastrel was once essential to Pierce’s mystique but now that romance has faded, he is drawing poignancy from reality. Eschewing all the typical leaden signifiers, he is effortlessly soulful because he sings with a knowledge of the dark end of the street; the shift from fantasy to reality on A Perfect Miracle is as affecting as that on the Temptations’ Just My Imagination, enhanced by the unbearable bittersweetness of melancholy.

The poignancy reaches its apotheosis on The Prize, another of And Nothing Hurts’ mortality blues, a slow build of hovering, Spector-meets-the-Velvets loveliness on which Pierce essays the briefness of existence via the metaphor of “time lend[ing] you her shotgun for a while”. His voice is achingly friable again now, and he barely shifts on that chair all night – static, perhaps, but his music still moving. He lets his associates do the heavy lifting tonight, and they peak on a sublime closing reading of gospel staple Oh Happy Day, its message of redemption a microcosm of the Pierce lyric book. The moment is rousing enough to raise Pierce from his seat, arms aloft in praise of the choir, his usually blank visage broken into bashful grin as if to say: life is short, and getting shorter every day, but there is still time before the whistle blows to snatch moments of transcendence like this.