SPIRITUALIZED
Announce details of vinyl reissue of ‘Pure Phase’ as part of The Spaceman Reissue Program.
Released on Fat Possum Records on 11th June 2021.
With Lazer Guided Melodies released this week to a chorus of rave reviews, Spiritualized and Fat Possum Records today announce the second stage of The Spaceman Reissue Program: definitive vinyl releases of the first four Spiritualized albums. Pure Phase, the band’s seminal second album, will be released 11th June via the label and is available to pre-order here.
The album is the second in this series of 180g double albums with lacquer cuts from original sources by Alchemy Mastering, presented in a gatefold jacket with reworked green artwork by Mark Farrow.
Briefly renamed Spiritualized Electric Mainline, Pure Phase expanded on the amount of personnel involved in making a Spiritualized record, with Sean Cook joining on bass and the Balanescu Quartest adding string arrangements. The record sounds like no other as there are two mixes running together concurrently. Commenting on the album today Jason Pierce recalls:
You can’t really compare this record to any other because of how we mixed it; in such an “incorrect” way. We mixed the tracks twice but I couldn’t decide which one I liked better so we said “let’s have them both”. Both of them were on tape so we spent hours cutting them into usable sections. If you run two things together in parallel you get this kind of Hawkwind effect (phase), which gets deeper as they drift away from being ‘locked’, so we had to keep re-locking on a bass drum every eight or ten bars and it took forever.
If you listen to the isolated parts, everything is incredibly simple, the horns, the slide, all these little motifs and they lock together like some strange kind of machine. Something like Kraftwerk was the nearest thing in my musical vocabulary at the time. Great rock and roll music is like systems, it has its own endless cycle. Pure Phase was Michael Nyman, Steve Reich and John Adams, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel music, and it sounds like driving as fast as you can in torrential rain.
I wish I could do it now, to mix things twice and throw it together and end up with this magic world. It was a thing that was out of our control and it just sounded better than we could have imagined so we chased it.
Pure Phase tracklisting:
1. Medication
2. The Slide Song
3. Electric Phase
4. All Of My Tears
5. These Blues
6. Let It Flow
7. Take Good Care Of It
8. Born Never Asked
9. Electric Mainline
10. Lay Back In The Sun
11. Good Times
12. Pure Phase
13. Spread Your Wings
14. Feel Like Goin’ Home
Acclaim for the vinyl reissue of Lazer Guided Melodies:
“A peerless debut… The songs are meticulously detailed with multi-layered vocals and string arrangements… Pierce developed his sonic obsessions through subsequent Spiritualized releases but Lazer Guided Melodies reminds us just how remarkably focused his original vision was.” Uncut – 9/10
“A spacerock masterpiece… The music was audacious, but not forbidding: Stooges primitivism rearranged by Brian Wilson; minimalist strategies played out with maximalist flourishes. Like the MC5 before them, Spiritualized had worked out how garage rock and spiritual jazz, twin incendiaries, could come together.” MOJO – 4 stars ****
“Like all the great albums – and make no mistake, this first Spiritualized LP is truly one of the best – Lazer Guided Melodies defies easy classification. What set Spiritualized apart was the manner in which they could voyage so easily among their musical reference points, but also soar far beyond them, conjuring up a most singular brand of visionary electronic psychedelia.” Electronic Sound
The Spaceman Reissue Program promises to give Spiritualized’s classic first four albums the fullest spectrum audio and physical treatment they’ve deserved since 1992. Stay tuned to this frequency for release dates and further information on The Spaceman Reissue Program releases of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (1997) and Let It Come Down (2001)
