Oh, the places Jason Pierce–aka J. Spaceman–has been, and you can take that any way you’d like. The English psychedelic rocker-cum-avant bluesman has always been heaven-bound in his ethereal yet soulful musical incarnations–first as a principal in the drug-mythologizing Spacemen 3, and the last 15 years as the primary force of Spiritualized–but he was literally steps away from St. Peter’s gates in 2005 after contracting double pneumonia. He had just found his muse for his next album; it would take two years before a fully recovered Pierce could re-engage with that project.
Songs in A&E may be Pierce at his most grave and heavy-hearted, but even the prospect of death hasn’t shaken his ultimately life-affirming music. In “Death Take Your Fiddle,” he incorporates the sounds of someone wearing an oxygen mask, their breaths taking longer than usual, but Pierce creakily counters that with a mortality-cheating refrain: “The way I feel now / death is not around.”
In fact, juxtapositions abound in A&E , which continues the stripped-down aesthetic Pierce explored in 2003’s Amazing Grace , but trades the garage bombast for mostly acoustic, classical and folk elements while retaining his signature spatial arrangements. The Southern gothic narrative of “Borrowed Your Gun” is scored symphonically; the country ballad “Don’t Hold Me Close” features a clarinet. And somehow, Pierce deftly makes sense of it all. It seems the pharmaceutical bluesman has made the transition from astronaut to cowboy.
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2008.
