Featuring More Than 30 Musicians and Singers, 'Everything Was Beautiful' Presents the Most "Live" Sounding Recordings that Spiritualized have Released Since the 'Live At The Albert Hall' Record of 1998
Following this year’s acclaimed reissue of their classic first four albums, Spiritualized’s new studio album, Everything Was Beautiful, will arrive on February 25th, 2022 via Bella Union. To celebrate the announcement, the band have shared a visually striking and timely video for lead track and album opener, ‘Always Together With You’, directed by J Spaceman. They’ve also announced news of an extensive international tour running from March-May 2022.
‘Always Together With You’ is a reworking/supercharging of a track originally released in demo quality in 2014. This new version is a perfect Spiritualized song – a breathtaking, hard-edged, psychedelic pop tune where themes of high romance and space travel collide.
While some people imploded in the lockdowns and isolation of the epidemic, others were thriving. “I felt like I’d been in training for this my whole life,” says Spiritualized’s J Spaceman.
He was referring to his fondness for isolation and when you reframe loneliness as “beautiful solitude” then it isn’t so bad. He would walk through an empty “Roman London” where “even the sirens had stopped singing” and where the world was “full of birdsong and strangeness and no contrails.” He used the birdsong walks to listen and try and make sense of all the music playing in his head. The mixes of his new record, a ninth studio album, weren’t working out yet.
On Everything Was Beautiful, J Spaceman plays 16 different instruments which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home. He also employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs, and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. So, there’s a lot going on, to say the least.
“There was so much information on it that the slightest move would unbalance it, but going around in circles is important to me. Not like you’re spiraling out of control but you’re going around and around and on each revolution you hold onto the good each time. Sure, you get mistakes as well, but you hold on to some of those too and that’s how you kind of… achieve. Well, you get there.”
Eventually, the mixes got there and Everything Was Beautiful was achieved. The result is some of the most “live” sounding recordings that Spiritualized have released since the Live At The Albert Hall record of 1998, around the time of Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.
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