It's 8:30 when the lights dim and the musicians start populating the stage one at a time. A frail looking Jason pierce enters last, sits on a chair, and the band starts playing Hey Jane from 2012's Sweet Heart, Sweet Light... And we're off for two hours of... How can we qualify Spiritualized's music? Some call it psychedelic (and it most certainly is), some call it garage rock, some call it space rock... Whatever it is, this music slows time down.
A Spiritualized concert is a trip, a cosmic voyage. A hazy, druggy blend of blues, gospel and rave rock, with a dash of Velvet Underground and Hawkwind sprinkled on top, with songs that go from delicate, ethereal ambient to raucous cacophony, building a hypnotic, lysergic crescendo of textures and sounds from where groove and dance pop up unexpectedly. But it all remains grounded in actual song craft steeped in the Blues tradition. With three guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and three backing vocalists, the sound is dense and powerful, and there is always something happening in some corner of the sonic spectrum.
Most of the evening's repertoire was culled from the last two records And Nothing Hurt (2018) and Everything Was Beautiful (2022), which the audience feted as loudly as more familiar numbers like Soul On Fire, Shine A Light or the classic Come Together.
A wonderful night of spaced out soundscapes and trippy dance rock, where, as with most mind-altering things, the hardest part was coming down.
Experience or re-live the concert by playing the setlist in the embedded Apple Music player below
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