Heavy Mental

Every day I wake up
And I take my medication
And I spend the rest of the day
Waiting for it to wear off

December, sitting under the bright white fairy lights, watching other lights dancing in the rain-smeared reflections on the window. The music is appropriately cold, like interstellar cold man, moments of beauty and relief chase regrets spinning across the void before clarity blurs blissfully. Spiritualized Pure Phase seems very, very now, 29 years after it was released.

All I wanted was a taste
Just enough to waste the day
Just enough to make me sick
Let it flow

I am not sure I have an LP that is as much about drugs in the whole of the 1537 as Pure Phase. I am not sure I have an LP that is as chilly in the whole of the 1537 as Pure Phase. I am not sure I have an LP that is shot through with helpless, hopeless warmth and beauty in the whole of the 1537 as Pure Phase. It’s a hell of a thing.

I’ve preached Spacemen 3 to you before, Spiritualized were chemically reconstituted from their ashes. Never the most stable band in terms of personnel, by the time Pure Phase was released the band were down to Jason Pierce, Kate Radley and Sean Cook, Mark Refoy and Jonny Mattock having been fired before release.

It is a sonically intriguing and rather beautifully captured LP. Opener ‘Medication’ featuring off-kilter orchestration, deceptively gentle sweetness, guitar bite and bits that remind me of the Beatles; Spiritualized win 1537 bonus points for swearing too.

Then, ladies and gentlemen, prepare for some spatial floatation on ‘The Slide Song’, a disembodied missive from the conscience/consciousness ‘I don’t know just why I need to do the things I do / And I’d love to do these things without them hurting you’. All set to a rather gorgeous gentle strumming and flute-ation tanking.

I won’t spoil Pure Phase by dissecting it song-by-song in front of your very eyes, drawing your attention to the sinews, tendons and juices that keep it taut, suffice to say it flows beautifully, subtly jarring and noisily lulling the listener across the Planescapes.

I will hold up a couple of favourite bits for particular praise though. The rather surprising Wha-monica (courtesy of Sean Cook) on ‘These Blues’ hurtles us towards an unexpected gut bucket spiral nebula delta blues sound. The sumptuous whispering desolation that is ‘Let It Flow’ and the contrasting quietly positive numb pulsations of the title track. The one-two snap at the end of ‘Spread Your Wings’ and ‘Feel Like Goin’ Home’ end in cautious optimism, or death depending on your interpretation.

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My copy of Pure Phase is a fancy pants 2021 reissue* and one of the best things about it, apart from the glow-in-the-dark vinyl are the restoration of some pictures taken by Kevin Westerberg. They feature Jason Pierce and Kate Radley, he in a spacesuit. It is just a perfect image and metaphor for the man formerly known as J Spaceman, the LP and the concept. Those feelings of separation, insulation from the outside world, otherness and reliance could not have been better visually represented. We are certainly exploring space here, as later in Spiritualized’s discography, but it is very much inner space, not outer; heavy mental.

The playing is wonderful and seamless throughout, jumpy though the sounds are occasionally. I like the way Pierce is credited with playing Gibson Firebird, always a cool guitar. The instrumentation is varied throughout, the Balanescu Quartet make welcome appearances and Radley is a great conjurer of psychedelic drones.

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For all the coldness of the uncaring void that Pure Phase strobes through, it is paradoxically a warm album. Even in its numbest, blankest bars there is a pulse of yearning for a human connection, no matter how badly fried those nerve endings may be. It is a weighty LP about weighty matters, yet somehow it floats past and through the listener with ease and grace.

Pure Phase often gets overlooked, or treated as a staging post on the road to Spiritualized’s next LP, unfairly I think. It is very much a song and mood cycle in and of itself. The perfect album for a cold, wet afternoon in December when you’re Jonesing for another, increasingly large hit of eggnog.

Medicate my days
Medicate my nights
Medicate my life
Don't it feel alright

1259 Down.

PS: Just because.

PS. Due to band/brand upheavals Pure Phase is credited to Spiritualized Electric Mainline; that was never going to stick as a band name.

*I wasn’t cool enough back in ’95. This reissue sounds absolutely amazing by the way, a brilliantly pressed LP.