Spiritualized

Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space

FAT POSSUM. DL/LP

Back in 1997, this writer commissioned now Poet Laureate Simon Armitage to review some new albums for a fledgling men’s magazine. The results were surprising. Praise was showered on the bleak Northern optimism of The Verve’s

Urban Hymns, but Jason Pierce’s lyrics for this – a masterpiece, surely? – were dismissed as naive, derivative, almost beneath contempt. Assembled from a series of US recording sessions (including two weeks in Memphis with Jim Dickinson), with contributions from

Dr. John, the London Community Gospel Choir, and pedal-steel maestro B.J. Cole, LAGWAFIS remains sonically astonishing, a junkie love letter to Southern soul, Elvis and The Jordanaires caught between painless dope bliss and symphonic night-sweats chaos.

Armitage? He’s right. Pierce’s lyrics are facile, but they work, they contain the simplicity of nursery rhyme, childlike inspiration salvaged from beneath the soft weight of heavy drugs. Fittingly, the vinyl – in reworked artwork by Mark Farrow, who created the original blister pack – now sounds enormous and allenveloping in a way that it never did in ’97.