Spiritualized, Songs In A&E

Jason Pierce's records, from his Spacemen 3 days onward, have always had a trinity of spirits hovering over them: drugs, death and God. This time, death is the one out in front: between the time most of these songs were written and when they were recorded, Pierce was hospitalized with double pneumonia and came close to dying. (The title isn't just a drone-rocker's two favorite chords, it's a reference to the British name for an emergency ward.) So, although the songs cover his usual emotional territory, it's his most mortal-sounding record to date — not just the way his voice often becomes a struggling rasp, but the pained scrape of his rhythms. (The closing waltz, "Goodnight Goodnight," doesn't just crawl from one note to the next, it ends with an allusion to Daniel Johnston's "Funeral Home.") The album's anchor, "Death Take Your Fiddle," underscores its dying-bed blues with the sound of a respirator.

But Songs in A&E isn't a valediction, it's an exhausted sigh of relief at having survived. It's no accident that three songs with "fire" in their titles are clustered together, or that they're followed by two genuinely fiery rockers. Another Pierce specialty is the dramatic slow sweep across a landscape of sound, and there are a lot of those here too. "Baby I'm Just a Fool" reconfigures ideas from the Velvet Underground & Nico — both Lou's and Nico's songs — for five minutes before the grand horn section and sitar kick in. The six "Harmony" interludes (named after filmmaker Harmony Korine) are graceful, protean instrumental fragments that act as sorts of scene transitions for the album. "Take me to the other side," Pierce once sang; this time, he's reveling in still being in this world.