The duality of Jason Pierce is the subject of I’m Your Man, the second track on the eighth Spiritualized album. “I could be faithful, honest and true … dependable all down the line,” Pierce sings in his fragile quaver. “But if you want wasted, loaded, permanently folded … I’m your man.”
Spiritualized are the bit that is dependable all down the line, making music that manages to be both hazy and focused, a daydream of gospel, rock’n’roll, country and psychedelia with an appeal that is at least in part dependent on an image of their leader as wasted, loaded and permanently folded. It may be more than 30 years since, as part of Spacemen 3, he claimed to be “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to”, but that’s still the essential perception of Pierce.
And Nothing Hurts is another reverie. Here It Comes (the Road) Let’s Go is a glorious road song that ignores the open highways for the country lanes: “Take the road down to the stream / Be sure to keep your licence clean.” The world-weariness of Let’s Dance is belied by its glorious arrangement, a simple circular guitar figure on to which more and more instruments are added, playing the same pattern or interlocking with it – piano, more guitars, more keyboards and then rolling brass – while strings drone in the background. It’s astounding. So simple, so expertly done and so beautiful: a sunset of a song. There’s rock’n’roll in On the Sunshine and The Morning After, but And Nothing Hurt is best when it lives up to its title and cocoons you.
