One moment, you're standing in the kitchen, stirring a pot of risotto and listening to the new Spiritualized album. The next, after you cop they’re actually playing down the road and Dave O'Grady can squeeze another lad into the venue, you’re standing in the pit watching one of the best live bands around at work.
It really is like a scene from Everything Everywhere All At Once without the hot dog fingers.
The new album is the reason for the quick cycle into town. You can truly judge Everything Was Beautiful by that title on the cover, a lovely rendering of Jason Pierce’s fascinations with rock’s finest influences and shades. You’ve jazz and blues, you’ve gospel and country, you’ve The Stooges and the Stones. I mean, what more do you need?
Pierce has also had both a knowledge and a reverence for the past masters, especially those who’ve fallen between the cracks. I remember interviewing him at some time in the late 90s/early '00s in London. A 30 minute slot turned into a few hours as stories and notes about lost records were traded. We found common ground in Little Jimmy Scott. He tipped me off to Jerry Lee Lewis doing a spooky take of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and my contribution was Jim Sullivan’s UFO album.
There are times when rock’n’roll commentary can become a geek chorus of names like that last par but Pierce takes a different tack with those chronicles. For him, such wide-eyed records and mavericks were the real true believers, the ones who took the high road and perhaps never came back.
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I hear the same philosophy on the new album, the same striving for something else, the same desire to head out towards the end of that rainbow and see what’s over yonder. We need more space cadets like this who willingly set the dials for deepest space.
