Spiritualized - Everything Was Beautiful

While the lockdowns were awful for most, as someone who actively chooses self-isolation as a way of getting by in the world it was something of a balm for Jason Pierce.

Finally afforded the peace and quiet which would allow the noises and music in his head a chance to breathe, Pierce re-commenced word on some of the demos that didn’t make the cut from his last album, 2018’s And Nothing Hurt.

Everything Was Beautiful does work as a companion piece of sorts (as noted by the linking titles, which taken in reverse order are a quotation from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five) to the previous album, but only in the way that all Spiritualized albums refer to each other.

Indeed, this album opens with a reading of the title, this time from Pierce’s daughter Poppy, in the same style that his then-girlfriend Kate Radley read the name of 1997’s seminal Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. The pharmaceutically-themed artwork can’t entirely be a coincidence either.

All the familiar Spiritualized sounds are here, but since Pierce has never been reluctant to throw the kitchen sink into his oceans of noise, such a statement is meaningless.

https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2022/04/review-spiritualized-everything/