Pure Phase

When interviewed about a recent batch of Spiritualized reissues, Jason Pierce said something along the lines of 1995’s Pure Phase being his favourite of their albums. For some, it’d be a weird choice, but I can see what he means. There’s something incredibly focused about Pure Phase, and it has a slightly out-of-focus trippiness that I haven’t really heard on any other album – by Spiritualized, or by any other groups. It’s partly down to the way the album played out, with two mixes of the album placed next to each other, in left and right channels, which led to many laborious hours in the editing suite keeping the two mixes in some nominal form of alignment. But it’s also the way Pierce has taken the comedown haze of the latter half of its predecessor, Lazer Guided Melodies, and spun that out into a complex suite of songs and instrumentals that seem, somehow, to reconcile the emotional directness of gospel and the blues with the insistent, mesmeric focus of minimalist composition. Rock music rarely felt this opiated.