Lazer Guided Melodies

Be sure to track down the "Medication" CD single and the live "Fucked Up Inside" as dual codas of Spiritualized's best period.

Oh wait, this isn't an S/D thread. My apologies.

Silly Matt, Trix are for kids (Leeee loves him the psych and drone and is even a bigger Bardo Pond fan than you or I, I think.) ;-)

I love this album.

apparently the whole four-tracks thing was jason pierce saying fuck you to radio play
my spz love turned to ambivalence when they got all lazy but i have good memories of this lp

Heh, I spent a good deal of time thinking about this album yesterday, in particular about how it is so near-perfect. It flows so incredibly well that, while there are one or two kind of dull songs, it does pay to listen to it in the assigned groupings.

Whereas "Ladies And Gentleman..." has usually left me cold, damned if I don't feel like I've melted by the end of "Shine a Light".

I love LGM but have recently been more into "Pure Phase", which I hold slightly superior

Slightly? It's a quantum leap. This is still pretty good mind.

Nuh-uh. LGM is their best.

I have come to the conclusion that LGM was only barely a Spiritualized album. Talking to many of the people involved in making it, I've come to the conclusion that it was, essentially, a Spacemen 3 album without Sonic Boom. It was all about that group of people, and that dynamic.

And because of that, it's pretty much completely different from anything else Spz ever did. And I've had to come to the conclusion, based on that, that I don't actually *like* Spz. I love Spacemen 3. I love LGM more than most other albums on earth. But it is a separate entity from what would follow.

I never get bored of this album. Never. I have listened to it hundreds of times, and still it captures me entirely, sweeps me up inside it and just carries me along with it, every time I hear it. I know every note so well I could hear it in my sleep, but still. Every time. It does something to me.

What Kate said. This is my favorite album of the 90s and one of my favorite albums ever, period, end of sentence, etc.

Feel So Sad is the best early Spiritualized work, I find, although Shine A Light, If I Were With Her Now and I *think* Angel Sigh run it close

Feel So Sad is revelatory, mind

^That's also basically spacemen 3.

yeah for me as well, this is one that never gets old after all these years. you've the sun, you've got the moon, and you've got LGM

Apparently yesterday was the 20th anniversary of its release.

I have finally stopped feeling old when 20 year anniversaries come up of my favourite albums. I've just accepted that I am old, and everything that made me was released half a lifetime ago.

Kate is right, everything after the Medication EP is not my cup of tea. Recurring/LGM are the pinnacle, and the second Sonic Boom LP is pretty great as well.

I did like the show last night, hell there were brief moments of transcendence... Spz. is back to a five piece band, Jason was standing up and completely engaged with the guitar, and for the first time in a zillion years he played those great little guitar melodies in "Walkin' With Jesus" like he did 25 years ago. I remember back when he fired everyone after LAGWAFIS and recruited Julian Cope's henchmen he was promising some sort of krautrock/motorik epic. Never happened, but the live versions of "Hey Jane" and "Heading For The Top" get there.

Still, I was feeling disconnected from what was going on. The show last night was at the Wiltern Theatre, a wonderful sounding old art deco hall that was the same venue for one of my all-time favorite Spz. shows back in '95. Then they were opening for Siouxsie and creating an awe-inspiring MBV-level racket that sent all the goth families fleeing for the foyer. It was a special show - no slight to Siouxsie, but Spz. blew them, the audience, and the surrounding city blocks off the stage, out of the theatre, and down Wilshire Blvd. I kept thinking about that show and how Spz. back then was a miscreant drone band attempting to make pop records. Now it's a working group of professionally capable folks trying to sound like a misfit drone band. There's no danger of sounding like things are just going to fly apart at any second, but if you're lucky the curtains part for a minute and you get a glimpse of that.

Twenty years is also the length of time between Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Momentary Lapse Of Reason so I have little reason to expect any different no matter who the artist is. LGM/Medication will always be my Mt. Rushmore/Apollo space program, but that's more about me than it is about Spiritualized. Took me awhile to figure that out.

It doesn't have to be like that. 20 years is also the length of time between the Drill e.p. and The King Of Limbs. Maybe that's the exception rather than the rule but Jason forgot that he was only ever as good as the miscreants around him, so he moved in ever decreasing circles musically.

there are musical acts that hit peaks 20 years apart and I can list a bunch of them, but they're the exception not the rule

so on the US 1996 reissue of this CD, the one that only has four tracks, the version of "Angel Sigh" is altered as follows:

Track 4 is approximately 1 minute longer than the UK 4 track release. However, this is not due to a different version of one of the tracks; approximately 1 minute into Angel Sigh the song restarts and then plays the track all the way through.

Was this intentional? It seems like it could just be a mistake that got left in - anybody know? I am splitting up the tracks on my CD of this and feel like I should edit it properly if it's a mistake.

hey, did you know that this is one of Graveyard Poet desert island records?

Track 4 is approximately 1 minute longer than the UK 4 track release. However, this is not due to a different version of one of the tracks; approximately 1 minute into Angel Sigh the song restarts and then plays the track all the way through.

Was this intentional? It seems like it could just be a mistake that got left in - anybody know? I am splitting up the tracks on my CD of this and feel like I should edit it properly if it's a mistake.

It's a mistake in that particular pressing. The German reissue from the same year (which has all the tracks separated) doesn't have it.

that always bugged me

Some US versions, on BMG, have, since 1996, retained a skip on all copies, causing "Angel Sigh" to false-start after about one minute. This error is one of the longest-standing in the major-label CD era, at thirteen years and counting.

I'm listening to this for the first time in i dont know how long and omg im blown away by the guitar in if I was with her now going all
CHANG
CHANG
CHANG
CHANG
CHANG
its just a beautiful sound, simultaneously aggressive and laid-back.

had been trying to find this in my pile of CDs for awhile, perhaps of interest to folks/fans of this era of the band: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8bja6z5lknangda/AAA5KZ3vkj7RxR3nB83QFrOWa?dl=0

good quality recording of BBC Radio sessions done in '92-'93 w Mark Radcliffe (who is an idiot and does a terrible job as an interviewer/introducer), including a couple things I can't recall ever seeing them do live like "Don't Go" and "If I Were With Her Now"