The packaging is the most obvious reference point: a medical design which in its £70 vinyl form comes with eight pieces of card you can pop out and fold into pill boxes. Then there’s the beginning: a female voice saying the album title (in this case Spiritualized main man Jason Pierce’s daughter Poppy) and a series of astronautical bleeps. There’s a lot on the ninth Spiritualized album that recalls Pierce’s greatest moment, the 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space, which also came in a foil pill package and sounded like it was being broadcast from another galaxy.
While Nineties music in the UK seems destined to be recalled for the Britpop Wars and little else, we might do better to remember bands like Radiohead, The Verve and Spiritualized launching rock music into a more expansive place in the latter part of the decade. Pierce could have faded into cult obscurity by now, age 56, and especially deserved a long lie down after nearly dying from double pneumonia in 2005, but instead he’s as meticulous as ever and showing extraordinary ambition on his latest.
