Amazing Grace a 'mediocre misstep'

Amazing Grace, the latest release from the band Spiritualized, represents a return to roots for front-man Jason Pierce.

Pierce, the only permanent member of Spiritualized, began his career with the now seminal Spacemen 3.

Releasing only a handful of records and singles throughout the 80s, the Spacemen's music was indebted just as much to the heroin it constantly wrote and sang about, as it was to bands like the Velvet Underground and Suicide. The band's songs were heavy with drones and feedback, and usually contained little in the way of song structure or even chord changes. Nevertheless, Spacemen 3 infused everything it wrote with an undeniable, almost frenzied intensity, earning the band a significant cult following and near-canonization after breaking up.

It's not surprising then that after leaving the group in '91 and forming Spiritualized, Pierce chose to emulate the dense minimalism of his former band as closely as possible.

The group's first releases were relatively faithful continuations of the defunct Spacemen's sound. Yet, with subsequent albums, the music of Pierce's new band deviated more and more from that of his old; the droned melodies suddenly turned into junkie symphonies complete with angelic choirs ,and the guitar feedback became 17 minute free-jazz workouts.

Although Spiritualized's ever-expanding sound did leave Pierce with some great records, it also resulted in 2001's Let It Come Down, an album that was too big and too epic for its own good.

Presumably unhappy with this last record and its escalating musical ambition, Pierce's latest album, Amazing Grace, is a return to his roots. But while Amazing Grace is certainly an album stripped of ostentation and epic ambitions, fans expecting the choirs and orchestras of recent releases to be replaced by the dreamy one-note drug-dirges of old will be disappointed. However, what does remain of this older, simpler sound is the same intensity that made Spacemen 3 so successful in its time.

As if to prove this fact to listeners immediately, Amazing Grace begins with two of Spiritualized's most direct, rocking tracks. "This Little Life of Mine" and "She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit)" are the types of songs that the Strokes and other members of the "garage-rock revival" make in their wet dreams.

The mic feeds back, the guitar feeds back, and everything feeds back. Pierce's voice is buried deep underneath all of this noise, yelling about heroin and his baby which, for all we know, are probably one and the same.

The songs are so immediate and fun that it is hard to notice or even care that they sound almost exactly the same. In fact, the biggest difference between Amazing Grace and preceding Spiritualized albums is the amount of space given to tracks like "This Little Life of Mine."

However, at his most grandiose, Pierce's best songs were always ballads, not fiery rockers. The ballads are still there, and even the choir makes an appearance. The example of these ballads, like "Oh Baby" and "Lord Let It Rain on Me," manage to give listeners only a vague feeling that they've heard better from the band before. This is true, and is also the reason the requisite Spiritualized rocker appears in four tracks on this album.

This is not to say that there's really anything wrong with songs like "Cheapster" or "Never Goin' Back." These songs repeat the formula of the album's first two tracks, but once the initial rush of these songs dissipates there's little else to hold the listener's attention.

"The Power and the Glory" is the album's obligatory nod to free jazz and is interesting in its own right, especially due to the inclusion of British sax-legend Evan Parker. However its vast swells of sound seem out of place amidst the relatively straightforward ballads and rockers.

One song that does demonstrate an immense amount of promise is "The Ballad of Richie Lee." "Richie Lee" is one of the few songs on Amazing Grace that makes a strong initial impression and continues to get richer with every listen. Comprised entirely of a bluesy guitar riff floating over plaintive strings and vocals, the song somehow manages to find a midpoint between the languid early Spiritualized and the catharsis of the late. Most importantly though, it suggests an interesting direction where Amazing Grace could have gone but, for whatever reason, didn't.

Amazing Grace proves that Pierce is at his best while operating under extremes. Spiritualized may have grown tired with its early minimalism and disenchanted with its ambitious later efforts, but despite the album's shortcomings, it's a lot more interesting to hear the band operate within one of these contraries than make an album like Amazing Grace. It's an album that is too small to be epic and too huge to be anything but. In the end, Amazing Grace is simply a mediocre misstep by an otherwise fantastic band.