ehhh.

Spiritualized - Never Goin’ Back

Spiritualized just keep eking up my list of favorite bands. Thinking about it, this kind of strikes me as odd because I had dismissed them for years, probably on the assumption that because they were loved by the British press they were some boring britpop band. Oh how wrong I was.

Sometime in 2008, I heard “Death Take Your Fiddle” in the middle of a mixtape. Immediately, I was struck by the emotional weight of the song (that breathing sound!). In my rush to hear everything that the band had put out, I realized how divided the discography was. Things either seemed to fall into that introspective slow side or a buzzing powerhouse one.

In my mind, “Never Goin’ Back” is the song that might just typify that second side of the Spiritualized sound, that fuzzy, feedbacking one that defines many of Jason Pierce’s best works. Granted, it is also typifies what might be seen as detriments in many Spiritualized songs; the repetition and generally simple song structures (in this case, the division of the song into two halves: the loud and the louder one).

What strikes me as making this song special though is how for the first section, there is such a reliance on the pulsing sleigh bells and while it continues unchangingly through the whole song, it quickly slips from the forefront and is almost forgotten when the song’s explosive second half takes over. Yet, even as it falls into the background and almost becomes a strain to hear over the rest of the cacophony, that pulse still manages to hold every other part in place when they feel like any one could begin careening out of control at any time.