Tony Stamp parses the ninth album by UK space-rock maximalists Spiritualized; a second EP from Poneke's Wiri Donna that's much louder than her first; and an ambient selection made by Ukrainian musician Koloah in the lead up to, and aftermath of, the Russian invasion.
Everything Was Beautiful by Spiritualized
Photo: Suppled
When I worked in a record store in the late 1990s, I was exposed to all sorts of new music by enthusiastic colleagues, but there was one album that was spoken about with particular reverence. A band called Spiritualized, led by a former member of Spaceman 3, had fused the garage rock power of The Stooges with psychedelia, and an abundance of instruments: brass, strings and choral arrangements were all part of the mix. One song was seventeen minutes long. Maximalism was the name of the game. Spiritualized were dubbed ‘space rock’, and their crowning achievement was appropriately called Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.
Twenty-five years have passed since then, and Spiritualized has kept releasing albums. But their latest, Everything Was Beautiful, refers back to their best-received work, in its artwork and themes, but mostly through J Spaceman’s penchant for cramming in as many instruments as possible, and having the results prove to be transcendent.
Space-rock is characterised by its long songs and hypnotic textures, and the ninth Spiritualized album has both in spades. Throughout there’s a balance between careful arrangements and moments where all the players do whatever they want, adding free jazz to the list of components.
Jason Pierce AKA J Spaceman is the brain behind all this, although the band’s core lineup has been stable since 1999. He plays sixteen instruments on this album in addition to singing and was joined by over thirty other musicians and vocalists. Recording took place over eleven studios.
In 2014 Pierce laid down a series of demos, one half of which became the 2018’s And Nothing Hurt. The other half became this album, but aurally they’re quite different. There are instrumental freakouts on that record, but nothing like the grandeur that’s achieved here over and over by all these layers working simultaneously.
According to Jason Pierce, some of these songs had over 200 tracks of audio. Because of this, mixing took years. He would take walks in a deserted London during lockdown and try to make sense of the compositions. He said they had so much information, the slightest move would unbalance them, so he said he cast his mind back to Ladies and Gentlemen’s maximalist approach, and the way music starts sounding like something new if you add enough stuff to it.
There are mellow songs here though, like ‘Let It Bleed’, which floats through its verse on the way to a bombastic chorus.
The songwriting here is archetypal, by Jason Pierce’s own admission. He’s a fan of the 12 bar blues, and told Guitarworld recently “you only need one chord to make a song”. You can hear that monotonic approach on tracks like ‘I’m Coming Home Again’.
The lovely simplicity of these songs works in harmony with their overloaded arrangements and keeps this from being an exhausting listen. Jason PIerce’s exhausted drawl works as a nice counterpoint too.
The artwork for Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space read ‘one tablet, 70 minutes’. The CD was enclosed in prescription foil. Everything Was Beautiful is similarly packaged like something you’d get from a chemist. Pierce clearly thinks this album will make you feel better. The adrenalin rush I get from these colossal soundscapes proves his point.
Being Alone by Wiri Donna
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There’s a floral theme to Wiri Donna’s 2020 EP Sprouts - in its title, artwork featuring a flower, and song titles like ‘Wandering Willies’ and ‘Manuka Honey’. The music was similarly tranquil, featuring her singing and playing guitar solo.
Two years later she’s released a follow-up, and the differences are immediately apparent: it has the more ominous title Being Alone, finds her joined by a frequently noisy new band, and contains songs coming from a place of righteous anger, tackling bodily autonomy and everyday sexism with fuzzed-out guitars and rhythmic propulsion.
The title track, which starts the EP, is immediately brave and bracing. The lyrics, about torn clothes and a bruised neck, are genuinely upsetting, and as Donna reclaims ownership of her body over the course of the song, the music follows suit, encapsulated in a swaggering distorted guitar riff.
That track tips its hat to nineties rock, but elsewhere the music is breezier, even if the subject matter isn’t. ‘You Should Be Smiling’ is, I assume, a reference to some men’s habit of telling women to smile, with Donna singing “It’s just another day being told how to behave”. Later there’s the wonderfully ambiguous refrain “It could burn happier on my skin”, before the chords darken and there’s another burst of cathartic lead guitar.
The opening line of that song, where Donna describes herself as “always filled with rage” over Autumnal fingerpicking, encapsulates the mix of light and shade here. In her press notes, she says she wanted to evoke a balance between “eternal optimism and pure devastation”.
On the song ‘No Follow Through’ the clouds part somewhat, but she’s still articulating a tricky concept, about people’s expectations of you versus your expectations of yourself, pointing out that it’s only the second one that really matters.
Wiri Donna’s real name is Bianca Bailey. She used to play drums in Tāmaki Makaurau bands before relocating to Poneke and starting her career as an indie-folk act.
Her nom de plume came from a job at Garden Centre - Wiri Donna is the name of a red mānuka with pink flowers. On her Bandcamp page, there’s a line drawing of her, hidden by a large flower. Similarly, the cover of Being Alone has hanging vines obscuring her face.
She’s said this EP is “less about things you learn growing up, more things that you discover when you’re alone”. For a second EP, it’s thoroughly well-realised, conceptually as well as musically - Donna and her band are all fine players.
The final track ‘Last Call’ sees her dipping back into folk territory in its opening, before the pathos increases, and we’re treated to one last blast of noisy catharsis.
Serenity by Koloah
Photo: Koloah
The morality of music can be nuanced in ways you don’t expect. I very much doubt Ukrainian musician Koloah had his career in mind when he made an album about the war he was living through, but that resonance with the news cycle meant it reached more ears than it would have otherwise.
Koloah’s real name is Dmitriy Avksentiev. He started making this album Serenity earlier this year, as Russian troops gathered on Ukraine’s border. The music we just heard is called ‘Before the Storm’. In an interview with Native Instruments, he said he knew war was coming, although many Kyiv citizens didn’t believe it. On March 1st the sound of tanks and gunfire began, 500m from his home, and he had to leave. He took his laptop, two t-shirts, a jacket and his cat Misha, and travelled for seventy hours without sleep, before finding a room in the Western city Stryi. For twenty days he didn’t produce anything, saying he felt "dead inside". But eventually, he started again.
The impetus for Koloah to resume production was a commercial job making music to help people sleep. The cognitive dissonance of making peaceful music while a war happened outside wasn’t lost on him, but he found making meditative music calmed him down and so he decided to finish the album and make it similarly mellow.
Ambient music as a balm for trying times is something we saw a lot of during the worst of the pandemic. Avksentiev refers to it as therapy. His previous work is similarly heavy on things like synth arpeggios, which have a subtle Eastern European flavour and sound like something you’d hear at a trance rave. What’s different here is the lack of any beat. He said after hearing so many rockets and bombs, he can’t make music with drums anymore.
Since the release of Serenity, Koloah has returned to Kyiv, and said he intends to stay. This album wasn’t just challenging for the obvious reasons - because he left all his hardware at home, he had to dig into the resources on his laptop to make it. One day he was walking through Stryi and heard singing coming from a church. He went in and recorded a hymn to the Virgin Mary on his iPhone, and the resulting song finishes the album. The sound of a choir submerged in reverb and blended with synth effects feels like an eerie snapshot of a moment in time; like all this music, an attempt at peace when that would seem to be impossible.
