The first four Spiritualized records are the sound of J Spaceman finding his way through the cosmos; bumping into debris, soaring over stars, crash landing onto bleak, lonely landscapes then taking off again, sometimes spinning around uncontrollably until he finds somewhere sublime that he can rest his head for a while, until the restless soul takes flight again. These records are as epic as they are intimate; a very human type of psychedelia where layers upon layers of swirling symphony never get too loud as to cover up the sound of the lost blues man's heart. If you listen hard enough you can hear the blood pumping through the veins, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.
Let It Come Down saw Jason Pierce rebuilding Spiritualized after the core line-up dissolved following the intensive touring process of Ladies And Gentlemen... Dion's Phil Spector-produced Born To Be With You was an influence. The initial recordings were made at John Coxon's studio before some 115 different musicians were brought into Air and Abbey Road Studios to work on these 11 songs. Spiritualized had always made wide-screen music but this time the movie theater was the size of the Coliseum.
"It's a funny record to me because in a way it's so conventional but it's got some of our most sublime moments," Pierce says. "A lot of people say Ladies & Gentlemen is where it happened because it's when they first got aboard, found out about this band. But people who got into it through Let It Come Down are as passionate about that album and then moved backwards to find the stuff that came before it. Some of it had ideas that didn't quite hit but when it does hit, it's way beyond where I thought it was gonna go; it's got these extraordinary parts that I don't think I could get anywhere near again."
The Spaceman Reissue Program presents definitive vinyl editions of the classic first four Spiritualized albums. Let It Come Down is the fourth in this series of 180g double albums mastered by Alchemy Mastering and presented in a gatefold jacket with reworked artwork by Mark Farrow.
