Music
Musically the album marks a return to "the more expansive elements of sound even though it features the fewest noise-scapes and most terse songs in Spiritualized's history." The Observer Music Monthly has described the album's sound as "touching and harrowing belligerent."
New songs such as "Death Take Your Fiddle" and, especially, "Sitting on Fire" - which sounds as if Pierce recorded the vocal from his deathbed - are eerily prescient, while "Don't Hold Me Close," a tender duet with film-maker Harmony Korine's wife, Rachel, recalls Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris Throughout the album there are interludes of church chimes, otherworldly beeps and odd noises. In places it could be mistaken for an album of elevator music made for funeral homes and released on electronic label Warp. It is quite a trip.
The album features a number of guest vocalists, including backing vocals from The Dirtbombs on "Yeah Yeah" and a duet with film-maker Harmony Korine's wife, Rachel on "Don't Hold Me Close." The album also introduces a greater influence of string arrangements to Spiritualized's sound. Pierce credits the compositions of the album's orchestrations to his paucity of technical skill. "I don't write music. So I just sing what I want into a tape machine. That way I'm not limited by what I can't play."
The ending of the last track, "Goodnight Goodnight," features a brief lyrical and melodic nod to Daniel Johnston's "Funeral Home" (from his albums Continued Story and 1990), which itself is a nod to Bruce Springsteen. Pierce has stated this was a 'thank-you' to the singer, as Pierce's first live performance after his recovery was supporting Johnston at a tribute concert, in which he played a version of Funeral Home, as well as two other Johnston songs.
Read more about this topic: Songs In A&E
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“Have you ever been up in your plane at night, alone, somewhere, 20,000 feet above the ocean?... Did you ever hear music up there?... It’s the music a man’s spirit sings to his heart, when the earth’s far away and there isn’t any more fear. It’s the high, fine, beautiful sound of an earth-bound creature who grew wings and flew up high and looked straight into the face of the future. And caught, just for an instant, the unbelievable vision of a free man in a free world.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“Let us describe the education of our men.... What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)