“Hey Jane,” the first proper track on Sweet Heart Sweet Light, starts in the fast lane and cruises for a solid nine minutes. Jason Pierce has been in and out of hospitals battling a degenerative liver disease with experimental chemotherapy. He’s come out alive and (mostly) well, sounding like a guy with too much bottled up angst to tell his story with a graceful build-up.
The one-gear tune of Sweet Heart Sweet Light—sweeping, hearts-opened emotion—is frankly outdated, but understandably. It’s a vein of storytelling that has circulated in Pierce’s blood for, oh, 30 years. The man who is Spiritualized is now 46 years old, has already seen 20th anniversary reissues of the great albums he released with Spacemen 3.
Fortunately, Pierce keeps happening upon life crises amenable to such navel-gazing, and capable of producing existential songwriting. Also, this somewhat dated brand of pop-craft happens to be in vogue again, and it is executed pretty damn well in recent albums by Girls. On “Hellhole Ratrace,” Girls harkened back to the Beatles, repeating love-song platitudes with enough confidence to make them resonate again as belt-worthy anthems.
Spiritualized did the same thing in 1997, on Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space and operates in the same territory today. Even a more “mature” Pierce would stand by his original flag-bearing mantra: “All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away.” And apparently, the same tired themes hold water with the old guy: the addictions, possibly with new cures; a girl or three to obsess over; anxiety surrounding death and a Jesus who died for somebody’s sins, but not his. Although Sweet Heart Sweet Light was supposed to be Spiritualized’s “pop” album, its best tracks are the seven-plus minute tunes like “Hey Jane,” “Get What You Deserve” and “Headin’ for the Top Now.” The long-runners feed well into the band’s back catalogue of fuzzed-out psych-rock and hypnotize with their wall of sound and propulsive bass, bolstering some damn optimistic statements of faith. Add to this the predictable female choruses and swelling strings, and Sweet Heart Sweet Light amounts to a pretty unstylish thing—perhaps even more for its turn to optimism. Though Pierce is still singing for redemption, still referencing the same grisly failures with drugs and romance, he actually seems to believe in his supplications when he sings lines like: “Freedom is yours if you want it.”
The album is a relief, like the final chapter in a multi-volume suicide note (to paraphrase Amiri Baraka). Or greater still, Sweet Heart Sweet Light reads with the closure of a well-concluded prayer. “So Long You Pretty Thing” closes the album as such: “So long you pretty thing/ God save your little soul/ The music that you played so hard ain’t on your radio/ And all your dreams of diamond rings/ And all that rock n’ roll can bring you/ Sail on, so long.”
Amen, brother.
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