Spiritualized - Let It Come Down

Certain phrases have a peculiar way of weaving themselves into the fabric of popular culture and consciousness, developing their own set of nuances and implications, often quite beyond the intent of their early utterances. When I first heard that Spiritualized has called its new album Let It Come Down, it occurred to me this seemed to be one of these familiar phrases.

'It will be rain to-night.'
'First Murderer'
'Let it come down.'
'They set upon BANQUO'

It took me a moment for me to recall the reference, but there it is—words spoken by the anonymous “First Murderer” in Act III, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, just before the three murders descend upon Banquo out of the darkness. It’s the strangest little bit of verbal irony in all of Shakespeare. Maybe it’s just Shakespeare’s idea of, to borrow a phrase from one of Quentin Tarantino’s character’s in Pulp Fiction, a “cold-blooded thing to say to a [expletive deleted] before you popped a cap in his ass.”

It turns out this little phase has quite a legacy in the nomenclature of cultural artifacts. American expatriate author and composer Paul Bowles borrowed the phrase as a title for his 1952 existential novel. Like Macbeth, Bowles’s novel is essentially about establishing one’s own identity—positing the existence of one’s self—through action. In the case of Macbeth, that aforementioned action was a profound negation—knifing-to-death one’s king and anyone else who might have a legitimate claim to royal authority. Bowles’s hero chose a similar resolution, but went about it wielding a hammer (sometimes it takes drastic measures).

There are plenty of less literary, more contemporary examples. In 1995, forgettable indie rockers St. Johnny put out an album called Let It Come Down. Then, in 1998, on hiatus from Smashing Pumpkins, guitarist James Iha did a solo record; he, too, chose to call it Let it Come Down. Art-noise rockers the Swans recorded a song called “Let It Come Down” for their ill-conceived 1989 major label debut (and, as luck would have it, major label, pardon the pun, swan song) This Burning World. Cabaret Voltaire did on song called “Let It Come Down” on 1993’s International Language. Blues pianist Mose Allison has been doing a number of that name since the late 60’s.

Even in popular music, the phrase echoes back over five decades. As an album title, Let It Come Down also enters into a referential conversation between titles begun in the late 60’s with the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed and the Beatles’ Let It Be.

And then there’s the more generalized and more profound echo a theme—the individual (re)claiming the self (or trying to) through negation—dadaism, Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Velvet Underground and the Stooges in the late 60’s and early 70’s, the Sex Pistols in the UK in the 70s, Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho in the 80s, Kurt Cobain with Nirvana in the 90’s, to name a few.

(Another example: as part of his stand-up routine, comedian Andy Kaufman used to do a series of celebrity impressions, each of them lousy. The audience would react with a mix of nervous laughter--laughing at Kaufman-as-lousy-celebrity-impersonator) and scorn, each response escalating in intensity as Kaufman went through his repertoire. Finally, Kaufmann, the incompetent impersonator, would announce that he was going to do Elvis Presley. Another wave of embarrassed laughter and groans would sweep over the audience. Kaufman would then launch into the most perfect imitation of Elvis Presley you’ve ever seen. He success with the audience was predicated on his ability to exploit his (other) self by showing himself up as performer.)

The question that plagues Camus throughout The Rebel is whether or not rebellion (of which he considered art a subgenre) was merely doomed to be a destructive enterprise. Can art, such as it is, actually achieve the goal he lays out for it—“restoring the unity of great style to the general disorder of gestures?” In the world of Macbeth, obviously it cannot. The only self-creative act the protagonist can muster is regicide, an irredeemable crime against the natural order that sets the world—including his own mind—against him.

By the time Bowles’ wrote his novel, the world had become much less transparent, much more slippery, so that Camus’s question merely slides off the it’s surface. Kesey’s rebel/artist is lobotomized. Ellis’s novel posits a psychopathic serial killer as the ideal 80’s American consumer.

The Beatles are no longer together, but the Rolling Stones are (sort of). Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious are dead. Elvis has been dead since the late 70’s, but in a weird Obi-Wan Kenobi kind of way, is more alive in pop culture than ever. The question remains unanswered.

The Stooges’ Raw Power was the first record Jason Pierce ever bought (I’m not sure what to call him here: Jason Pierce . . .J. Spaceman . . . Spiritualized—it’s all the same entity, more or less—remember, we’re talking about indentity, fragmentation, and getting carved up). By 1974 Stooges’ heroin-addled frontman Iggy Pop had turned Macbeth’s knife on himself as proof of his own existence, carving up his own chest on stage during a show at the Rodney English Discotheque.

The Stooges, along with the Velvet Underground, were important early influences on Spacemen 3, the band Pierce formed with Pete Kember (aka “Sonic Boom”). ,” Specializing in droning, minimalist neo-psychedelic rock, the band summed up their musical philosophy as ”taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.”

A rift eventually developed in the band, with Pierce wanting to explore the use of the recording studio as a primary creative tool, and Kemper opposed to anything that could not be replicated live. The disagreement proved fatal to the band, with Spaceman 3 releasing their final album, Recurring, which consisted of Kemper’s songs on Side 1 and Pierce’s on Side 2.

Although Spiritualized’s albums retained the Spaceman 3’s core sound and key influences on the band like the Velvets, Stooges, Suicide, LaMonte Young, and Steve Reich, Pierce’s new band has expanded the aesthetic principles beneath the “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to” manifesto, embracing a range of gospel, soul, and New Orleans jazz and blues music elements in their songs.

Pierce’s Spiritualized records have been increasingly studio-orientated. As such, record producer/arrangers such as Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Jimi Hendrix with engineer Eddie Kramer, have had a greater influence on Spiritualized’s albums than have performing musicians.

1992’s Lazer Guided Melodies perfected the sound Pierce and Kemper had developed in Spacemen 3. Pure Phase (1995) offered a fuller, more heavily orchestrated sound. When Pierce was unable to choose between two completed mixes of the album, he enlisted the help of producer John Coxon to synchronize the mixes so that the final release mix of the album is actually both mixes running simultaneously, one in each stereo channel (this is best appreciated with headphones). Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space (1997) successfully integrated the space rock/dream pop intricacies of Spiritualized’s earlier albums with Pierce’s growing fascination with gospel, blues, soul, and jazz.

The new album carries all of the above-mentioned cultural and musical paraphernalia forward along with it. For Let It Come Down, Pierce spent a year in pre-production, transcribing countless musical ideas, first singing and humming snippets of melody into a tape recorder, then transcribing from tape to piano, then finally to charted musical arrangements. His final arrangements were so precise that once they entered the studio, although some tracks featured as many as 100 musicians, the actual recording sessions lasted only three weeks. With the sessions wrapped, Pierce spent nearly another year mixing the album.

The result is something that couldn’t have happened any other way: a near-masterpiece of rock bricolage, a unique cut-and-paste job from a whole range of instruments, ideas, modes, genres, and resources. English novelist Martin Amis titled a recently published collection of essay The War Against Clichés. This could be an alternate title for Spiritualized’s new album. On Let It Come Down, Spiritualized—like Macbeth—hacks and slashes its subjects and signifiers, but then painstakingly reconstructs (deconstructs?) and recontextualizes fragments of the received ideas of pop music, space rock, gospel choir, orchestral strings and brass, and New Orleans-style jazz, rock, and rhythm-and-blues.

While perhaps the album falls short of Camus’s “great style,” it certainly is an admirable attempt at creating a new “unity” from the “general disorder” of the tired stock [musical] gestures of contemporary music. From the atmospheric choir/orchestra soul of “Stop Your Crying,” to the sweeping strings-and-electric-guitar ballad “Out of Sight,” to the spacey psychedelics of “Don’t Just Do Something” and “Won’t Get to Heaven (The State I’m In),” Let It Come Down surpasses anything that Jason Pierce-J. Spaceman-Spiritualized has done yet, both in aspiration and in accomplishment.

Given the intense studio-specific density of the songs on Let It Come Down, we here at Sound of Youth will be interested to see how these songs sound performed on tour. *

Matt Parks (March 9, 2002)

*Shortly after I finished writing this review, I learned that Pierce has dismissed the horn section touring with Spiritualized after a show in Athens, apparently frustrated by difficulties replicating songs from Let It Come Down live. They will continue the tour as a scaled-down seven-piece band. Given these developments, it will be interesting to see how, going forward, Spiritualized will resolve tensions between its desire to fully utilize the possibilities of the recording studio with the need to offset the cost of their studio creations by perform live. Stay tuned.