Spiritualized /// “I Think I’m In Love” /// Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
Taking me down a rabbithole and into a neo-psychedelic, free-floating sadness this past Saturday was Spiritualized’s seminal Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. The damn thing blindsides me every time I throw it on, morphing from haunted chillout music to barn-burning drug odyssey within two flawless tracks and never letting up from there. If you can make it through to “Cop Shoot Cop,” the napalm’d free-jazz closer, without regretting a life choice, you’re a stronger listener than I. But it may be the mid-song silence+payoff and shatteringly dark tossed-off lyrics of “I Think I’m In Love” that devastate most thoroughly. The throbbing harmonica, sonar piano pings, slurred horns, endlessly circling Moog and orchestral scope provide their own sinister haze, yet nothing truly stings until Jason Pierce tells us: “Think I’m in love / Probably just hungry.”
