Spiritualized - Songs in A&E (2008)
there's better things another day - september 20, 2025
The laws of reality bend whenever you’re dealing with something that is very clearly and obviously close to death. Not just the general concept, but its physical reality-- the stench, the annihilation, the absence. The rules of engagement are simply completely different because of the heavy, dark pit we have built for death in our lives. This is mostly true in matters of grievance- Mount Erie's A Crow Looked at Me is, to this day, daintily handled with velvet gloves in any discussion. But there’s also the Album About Your Death. The first-person perspective on the end is a rare and valuable thing. Whether the artist is highly aware they’re about to die (hello David), or has just come out the other end (hello Josh), the resulting look into/reflection on total oblivion is usually worth some examination.
Jason Pierce is no stranger to not being healthy. It’s not very often that someone admits they took chemotherapy for an unspecified illness and the general response is “well, that tracks.” A good portion of Spiritualized’s catalogue is thus filtered through hospital windows and medical haze. Nowhere is that haze quite as thick as it is on Songs in A&E, though, the album in which Pierce almost died twice due to a particularly nasty case of pneumonia. That sickness is pretty much everywhere. The album’s new cover on streaming is Pierce’s own arm taking an IV drip. His voice is very obviously labored. “Death Take Your Fiddle” is defined by its omnipresent ventilator-assisted breathing. It’s still psychedelic like a Spiritualized album should be, but it’s got a downtrodden nature like something out of a Townes Van Zandt record, like trying to find something to make yourself laugh (or at least hurt less) while the wolf is looking at you from the corner of your room.
What makes A&E really interesting, though, is the sense of comfort it tries to instill despite the death that completely surrounds it and threatens to take it whole. It feels like a heroin high when you’re about two seconds from kicking it. It’s slow and warm and soft while teetering over a deep abyss. Sometimes too slow, to the point where the morphine drip stops making a point and starts actively trying to put the listener to sleep along with Pierce. It ultimately feels like the weak attempts you make at trying to convince your loved ones that you’ll be alright soon enough, and they’ll be okay, too. You just need to beat this silly thing you’re dealing with. You’ve still got hope, somehow. Thank god for the staff treating you.
It’s hard to evaluate an album about death. Balancing respect and tragedy with the messy nature of subjective quality leads to disaster… most of the time. A&E is gorgeous and lovingly textured to match its ICU environs, with a few catchy songs to leave with you as you exit the hospital ward. It’s also most definitely not a great album and well overstays its welcome. It gets too lost, too sad (in an overarching way) to hold itself up for its nearly hour-long runtime, a bit too… boring. But is that excused by the hospital stay and the heart stoppages? How much does the scythe elevate its creative after-effects in the mortal world? How should an album that’s very clearly not your best work be treated because you almost died making it?
Songs in A&E is an album thick in the haze of death that wishes it wasn’t. Somewhere under there is the strength to keep going, barely, but still there. It’s lolling deep in the fog, drifting off the edge of the world… and it comes back alive. Not perfect, but that’s far from your standard for being okay right now.
on the road to recovery