Spiritualized @ Turner Hall, 9/9/2008
Spiritualized @ The 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago
About a decade ago, Spiritualized all but tore down The Rave with an evening of musical pummeling and a head-shearing light show. The several dozen other fans in attendance will back me up. Anyone at Tuesday night’s show realizes how fortunate we are that Jason Pierce and band came back to Milwaukee.
Emerging from the fog, Pierce — along with his four bandmates and two backup gospel singers — set the stage with a riveting, heavy version of “Amazing Grace”. With that they set the controls for the dark side of Turner Hall as the band’s modus operandi built on chaotic, driving crescendos and walls of sound only to bring songs back down to stark vocal arrangements. Even the sound man played the board like another instrument. There have been few musical nights like this since the U.S. Government took codeine off the shelves.
Touring in support of the album Songs in A&E, whose back story might have been Pierce’s brush with the reaper during a nasty bout of double pneumonia, except the material was writ beforehand. Thus tunes like “Death Take Your Fiddle” (which sounded like an ancient Appalachian ballad) or “Soul on Fire” (which could rival anything on the modern hipster radio stations) already fit like a glove. And incandescent wailing vocals at the end of “Come Together” sounded less like a wake than a Baptist revival meeting down by the river.
These days, Pierce’s voice has weathered to a fine, weary patina, reminiscent of Peter Perrett of the Only Ones, a fellow traveler familiar with the power of a script. Never straying far from the twin towers of spiritual transcendence and escapism, at Turner Spiritualized’s take on “Lay Back in the Sun” (“Good dope and good fun”) – something of an homage to Brian Wilson and Beach Boys — made groups like The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Raveonettes seem like kids who just got a fuzzbox for Christmas.
“Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” was transformed in to an elegiac waltz that segued into just Pierce and the gospel voices singing a stunning last verse of Elvis’ “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You”. Thought it’s doubtful that many from the religious right were in attendance, Pierce’s affinity for blending rock and religious themes was well represented on “Lord Can you Hear Me,” as well as Spacemen 3’s “Walking With Jesus” and “Take Me to the Other Side.”
All good things must come to an end as the evening’s finale built to a maelstrom of light and sound that walked the tightrope between bliss and a bad trip. Pierce and company encored with a subdued “Lord Can You Hear Me” after which he applauded the audience and directed his first comments of the night to the crowd. “Thank you,” Pierce said as he disappeared back into the fog and left the stage. VS
