Indulgent, weirdly ponderous set from space rock legend Jason Pierce and company.
Love. Religion. Heroin. Death. What else is there? Over a forty year career, first with Spacemen 3 and then with a huge cast of rotating musicians under the Spiritualized banner, J Spaceman has written some of the most beautiful, transcendental, and heartfelt psych-prog-jazz-blues mantras known to man.
That he decided to play barely any of them at this sold-out Brighton Festival show is a puzzle for the ages.
It all starts so promisingly. The band, with gospel backing singers, synths and enough guitarists to create that trademark scuzzy wall of sound, are on great form, and the sound engineering is excellent, though the show is notably quieter than the eardrum-shredding gigs of yore.
And early on we get Shine a Light, a genuine classic from Laser Guided Melodies way back in 1992, beautifully performed to the sound of middle aged men sobbing into their plastic pint pots.
Soon after, we get the space rock perfection of She Kissed Me, It Felt Like A Hit, all insistent piano and a catchy hook that upends the controversial sixties Spector single.
And then… the pace turns to the soporific, as Pierce dutifully plods through his most recent album, 2022’s Everything Was Beautiful, with his still-lovely voice attempting to find meaning in songs that at best sound like pastiches of his earlier work.
The gap between timeless and naff is as thin as a needle. This songwriter has always been unapologetic about finessing and returning to his key themes and lyrical motifs, but in later years a certain edge has been lost.
For a great deal of this set, soporific ballads, often outstaying their welcome by longer than an entire Motown single, plod on towards another conclusion where once this band raged and sparkled.
Soon, each new song is greeted by an exodus to the bar, and Pierce’s tendency to repeat himself leads to curdled excitement in the room. A song that sounds like the start of 1997’s Come Together is met by rapturous applause, until it becomes clear that the song indeed just sounds like the start of 1997’s Come Together.
Similarly, a nursery-rhyme melody that brings back memories of Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space leads to an excited collective intake of breath, until people realise it’s a song by a more recent, inferior album, and the bar calls once again.
The Reviews Hub isn’t expecting a nostalgia show, but depriving this expectant audience of any of the artist’s best material feels strangely arrogant, or at least a lack of awareness that most aren’t here to hear half-assed songs from 2022.
At the end, there is a standing ovation, electricity in the air for an expected encore of greater hits. Instead, the house lights go up, and a puzzled crowd head on home.
Reviewed on 18th May
1 Comment
The reviewer is being kind, and unnecessarily so. The band’s attitude is summed up as follows: “We don’t care what you want. We’re not going to talk to you. We’re not even going to acknowledge your presence. And we’re not going to let you see our faces.” Mushy sound of monotonous music; every piece sounded like the one before, and after, it. Blinding the audience every few seconds with strobes backlighting the musicians, without even once spotlighting anyone from the audience’s direction so we could actually see them — an exhibition of the lofty heights of disdain for that same paying audience that this act reached. Possibly the worst — or simply the most ignorant — set lighting scheme ever devised. A cheap back curtain of LEDs — maybe supposed to represent stars — and a mirror ball used once or twice, completed the garage band effect. We left early, I believe only the second time in my 6 decades of concert-going that I’ve done so. Like other audience members who headed to bar and then the door, we had to wake up first.