Spiritualized stay psychedelic, Bob Vylan get angrily political

Jason Pierce’s songwriting will enthrall fans, while Bob Vylan’s will fire them up. Meanwhile, Fontaines DC offer a love letter to Dublin

Spiritualized, Everything Was Beautiful ★★★★☆

Everything Was Beautiful is the ninth album from Spiritualized, and to fans of the cult British ensemble, that’s probably enough to recommend it. It might be unfair to suggest that Jason Pierce essentially makes the same record over and over again, but there has been a strong thematic and stylistic consistency across his oeuvre, from the mantric psychedelia of 1980s indie trio Spaceman 3, which he co-fronted, to his work as the sole consistent member of Spiritualized, who have been producing stoned shoegazing epics since 1992’s Lazer Guided Melodies.

What Pierce does is deceptively simple: he builds songs around basic chord progressions which he repeats, threads with repetitive licks and riffs, and adorns with plaintive nursery-rhyme melodies and simple yet thoughtful lyrics; he sings the latter in a tiny, wasted, sad-sack voice, to which he adds layer after layer of instrumentation. With a unique sense of orchestration, Pierce painstakingly builds something more immense than even the most towering Phil Spector-style Wall of Sound. It is more akin to a tsunami of sound, with qualities of space and density, liquid and majestic, threatening and beautiful – and almost incomprehensibly overwhelming.

Pierce effectively perfected this approach on Spiritualized’s 1997 masterpiece Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space. I think his latest release may be his finest work since – but I always think that. It can be hard to maintain critical objectivity in music where the entire purpose is to crash down on the listener and sweep them away.

Everything Was Beautiful is a sequel of sorts to 2018’s And Nothing Hurts, with basic tracks written and recorded at the same time. Pierce continued to work on these songs for several years, adding further instruments and mixing and remixing throughout the pandemic, which (judging by his comments) he seems to have rather enjoyed. “I felt like I’d been in training for this my whole life,” the reclusive 56-year-old musician has said, adding that the final shape of the record came to him walking through the empty streets of London where “even the sirens had stopped singing”.

The album was made with a cast of over 30 musicians, with brass sections and choirs and Pierce himself playing 16 different instruments. Its seven songs stretch across 44 minutes, from the blissful opening romance of Always Together with You to the 10-minute journey of the concluding epic, I’m Coming Home Again. “I’ve been there and I’ve been back,” Pierce sings, which seems a fair summation of his career, as does his follow-up line: “Gonna dull it with Lorazepam” (a medication used to treat anxiety and sleep disorders).

The artwork for Everything Was Beautiful features a medical pill-box that (on the vinyl version) you can pop out and assemble. Pierce’s lyrics are peppered with narcotic references, and for some listeners his whole style is synonymous with the highs and lows of drug use. But you don’t need to be in an altered state to become overwhelmed by his mastery of controlled cacophony. It is a pleasure to report that everything is still beautiful in Pierce’s strange sonic world. Neil McCormick

Irish rockers Fontaines D.C.

Fontaines DC, Skinty Fia ★★★★☆

The way Irish punk rockers Fontaines DC tell it, their manager only had one thing to say in response to their latest and third album. “Lads,” he told them, “this is the darkest s–t you’ve ever written.”

After the sharply-observed chronicling of life in their beloved Dublin on 2019’s debut Dogrel, and 2020’s A Hero’s Death cataloguing a growing distance as the band’s profile took them away from home, Skinty Fia (a phrase relating to the extinction of the Irish deer, also used as an expletive) offers a more distanced look at their cultural identity.

Having moved to London and now looking at his old home from afar, frontman Grian Chatten seems near-despondent in this album. A gifted lyricist with a talent for vivid imagery, he spins tales of staying true to himself in a place where his accent has been seen as a novelty.

It’s indie with a sense of the cinematic. The longing of opener In ár gCroíthe go deo (In Our Hearts Forever) is vast in intent, while keeping a warm melancholy at its core. Bloomsday’s slow-burning slide-guitar has a gritty elegance, while on Big Shot, over a languid riff, Chatten ponders life when you’ve finally got what you want.

“You’ve been through the war / But you’ve nothing to show / I travelled to space / Found the moon too small”. And when guitars aren’t expressive enough (and Fontaines DC can do much with six strings), The Couple Across The Way makes its musical point with just an accordion.

Their manager’s right: this is the darkest Fontaines DC album to date. But what drives it forward isn’t morbidity or anger, but a search for connection. It’s this that makes it not a dirge, but an oddly bright snapshot of life’s confusions from a band capable of capturing them brilliantly. Nick Ruskell

London punk-grime duo Bob Vylan favour revolution over evolutionCredit: Raf Chalpinski

Bob Vylan, Bob Vylan Presents The Price of Life ★★★★☆

“None of my heroes appear on a stamp or a five pound note / Give Churchill’s statue the rope and see if it floats.”

Soon into their new album, Bob Vylan Presents the Price Of Life, singer Bobby Vylan and his drumming partner-in-crime (helpfully called Bobbie Vylan) have already called out two former Prime Ministers, declared that “the killing of kids with two-pound chicken and chips is a tactic of war waged on the poor”, and suggested you “eat the rich before they turn and eat your children”. Even Elvis gets a gloves-off slap: “He never meant s–t to me because the f–ker was whack, plus he hated blacks and he never made one hot track.”

With an attitude of no gods, no masters, in sound and intent this record from the duo Bob Vylan favours revolution over evolution. A deadly mix of explosive punk, rapid-fire grime, relentless drum ’n’ bass energy and anything else that’s loud and lairy, their second album – proudly released on their own label – is a record built from hard times. With lyrical vignettes about stab-proof vests, food poverty, racism and inequality (“Some are drowning in money, I’m barely keeping my head up”), it’s also one that delivers its truths like a deftly thrown brick.

Among the more obvious bear-poking and anger at the imbalances of life in the 2020s, there are threads of genuine positivity, albeit ones focused on survival. On Health Is Wealth, the importance of looking after yourself is writ large (neither band member drinks), while the intent of the relatively restrained raps of Must Be More is self-evident.

Bob Vylan aren’t concerned with keeping people they don’t like happy. Actually, they admit they’re spoiling for a fight with them. It makes …The Price Of Life as provocative as Rage Against The Machine, and as sonically exciting as The Prodigy: this is one of the most incendiary British records of 2022. NR