As Jason Pierce lay in intensive care, close to death with pneumonia, he listened to the noises being made by the life-support machines monitoring him and his fellow patients. It sounded, he says, with characteristic regard for music over matter, like a beautiful, polyrhythmic symphony. This was back in 2005. Since then the grand orchestrator of dope rock has played some astonishing live shows under the Acoustic Mainline banner, released an album of guitar loops, and finished off his sixth studio album with his band Spiritualized.
Presumably the quasi-religious sleeve images of IV catheters and the respirator breathing that sets the pace for ‘Death Take Your Fiddle’ are very much post-intensive care additions. But the the Westlife-like chorus of single ‘Soul on Fire’, the lyrical fondness for crying souls and flaming hearts, and the shift in Pierce’s voice from damaged sweetness to cloying croak, seem more a swell in the tidal wave of sentimentality that swept up and threatened to drown out 2001’s ‘Let it Come Down’. Exhilarating patches of raggedy proto-punk and brass-fired jazz rock aside, we have to confess, we’re bored.
