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:
“It is hard to describe the thrill of creative joy which the artist feels when the conviction seizes her that at last she has caught the very soul of the character she wishes to portray, in the music and action which reveal it.”
—Maria Jeritza (1887–1982)
“As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. The hero is the sole patron of music.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)