Lazer Guided Melodies (1992)

I wandered into the Spacemen 3 complex late, by way of their cover circa 1991 of Mudhoney’s “When Tomorrow Hits” (it'll hit you hard). I had known them before—I think everyone did, more or less—for their famous credo “taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.” They owned that Mudhoney track, brought out all its power on their way out the door. I listened to it a lot and think of it as a Spacemen 3 song. They splintered shortly after, but I followed or caught up on various spinoffs and side projects. Spiritualized, headed up by Jason Pierce (aka J. Spaceman), was probably the biggest, certainly the most enduring and commercially successful—1997’s Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, got most of the attention. Some versions of that album were sold in a package that mimicked pharmaceutical blister packs, carrying on a familiar theme. And Pierce and an ever-shifting cast have hung in there all this time. Their 2018 album And Nothing Hurt and their 2022 album Everything Was Beautiful (hi, Kurt Vonnegut!) are both on Fat Possum, which suggests another Spiritualized theme has also continued, finding one thread of their arch roots in gospel and country blues. Lazer Guided Melodies is the first Spiritualized album, a quiet masterpiece that bears most of the seeds of what was to come. I’m still not convinced you need to go any further. It’s built in many ways on the grungy aesthetic of its time, alternating quiet parts with loud parts, but the dynamic is more working steadily across the length of the LP. The early songs are lulling and shorter, setting a meditative tone. My first impressions were more that they were vaporous but close attention discloses the strategy, setting up the longer, symphonic pieces to come, incrementally growing larger and larger until the album has become quite big by the time of “Step Into the Breeze” and, especially, ”Symphony Space” forward. Horns and strings show up just as if they belong and somehow they do. Principal songwriter Pierce checks his influences on the fourth track, “Run,” which is co-credited to J.J. Cale but plainly also paying reverence to the Velvet Underground, perhaps the single greatest influence. Another way to look at the structure of Lazer Guided Melodies, no doubt, is in terms of psychedelic drug use (with or without pharmaceutical enhancements). The first half of the album (sections designated as “Red” and “Green”) are in the reflective and tenuous mood of dropping and waiting to come on. A 15-minute swirling floating-in-space peak is delivered in the “Blue” section (“Take Your Time” and “Shine a Light”), and then the gospel-inflected coming-down aftermath of the “Black” section. It’s so understated in its totality that the effects may not even be detectable at first. Use once daily.