Spiritualized just aren't that interesting--if you're listening. As background music, and as a disorienting performance ensemble, Spiritualized succeed in instantly lending a room that hazy feeling only touched upon by the naive and chaotic recordings J. Spaceman participated in under the name Spacemen 3. The new live discs represent just how much more powerful his soul psychedelia can be live, and it is impressive (though I thought Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space was a path best left untaken); the problem is, it's just too referential. The soul-bliss Spiritualized offers tongue-(and pill)-in-cheek is likely already part of the audience's daily prescription. If you go to a Spiritualized concert, you're ready to submit the second you walk in the door, so there's very little left for a band like that to do. And though they do more with their pre-programmed audience than say Def Leppard ever managed to, Spiritualized offer a watered-down version of the harder acid once spinning under the name Spacemen 3.
Spacemen 3's component parts--Pete Kember (Sonic Boom), Jason Pierce (J. Spaceman), Pete "Bassman" Bain, Natty Brooker, and a couple less notables--began as a revival of late-60s drug-induced psychedelia. Tempered by the image and attitude of The Velvet Underground, their swirling post-soul drones lurched forward at lengths frequently exceeding ten minutes; simple, repetitive, and mostly disposable--if you've heard three Spacemen 3 songs, you've heard them all. Your tolerance builds right up.
A lot of Spacemen 3 records contained extensive proto-ambient pieces--I use the term because they're glaringly and perhaps beautifully unlike the neo-classicism Brian Eno mandated when he issued The Ambient Manifesto. It's a problem, trying to categorize Sonic Boom's ramblings--and make no mistake, these interludes were always credited to Sonic Boom--because there's no genre to speak of. If anything, we could be listening to a Silver Apples sound-check, but as Sonic Boom was probably the only person on the planet listening to Silver Apples in 1986, I don't consider it an obvious parallel. At any rate, it was for the most part evident who made the noise and who wrote the songs; this dichotomy was never resolved, and the band parted ways after their remarkable 1991 coda, Recurring.
As is often pointed out by reviewers the world over, Pierce was the first active post-Spaceman. In fact he was using the name Spacemen 3 on small-run records pressed in England in 1991, which prompted Kember to publically disband the group in livid resignation. Spiritualized is a better name anyway. Pierce pressed on, duly inspiring critics that hung on his every move, and Kember became something of a pariah in the press. Lurid tales sprung up in the trades, of narcotic comas, entire months spent fucked up on acid--it seemed almost calculated. The press made a nice revisionist history of Spacemen 3, attributing the drug references and consumption almost entirely to Kember. All the respect for their brilliance, craftiness and originality were passed to Pierce. Given the appearance of LPs with titles like For All The Fucked Up Children Of The World We Give You Spacemen 3, Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To, and the arrival of a bootleg called Heroin, there was a lot to answer for in the alarmist, conservative British press. Things weren't completely cut-and-dried--everyone knew Pierce was one of the UK's most avid pot-smokers--but somehow Sonic Boom had within a couple of years emerged as the BMI's resident alien.
Sonic's first band was Spectrum, whose first full-length quickly followed Recurring; its speedy release resulted in poor construction. The lead-off track "How You Satisfy Me" is a brilliant Sonic Boom pop song, toying with the track's utter collapse as walls of noise and nonsense drown out the too-simple melodies. But as the record goes on, things get Recurring indeed--variations on a theme, hello. What were once interludes and landscapes ("Ecstasy Symphony") became entire records, and the inclusion o "How You Satisfy Me" on Soul Kiss (Glide Divine) simply has to have been at the urging or demand of Silvertone (the famously controlling and conniving label that released it). Soon after, the label folded, and as Spectrum were "no Stone Roses", Silvertone let them alone. Double seven-inches and a picture-disc followed. Goodbye Sonic Boom, hello Experimental Audio Research.
From their beginnings Spiritualized enjoyed massive success in the UK, and rapidly developed a nice cult following in the States. Their debut record was properly supported in both countries by Arista's luminaries, and basically, Pierce co-opted whatever reputation/fan-base Spacemen 3 had.
To that end, they have prospered where Sonic Boom has languished. They are a band as opposed to an experiment, and one can't really compare the two. Pierce's dream is a grandiose--if hackneyed--vision that's found its place, where Kember's stoic radicalism has both isolated and limited his effectiveness (his sonic manifestos rarely hit the creative mark). The latest Sonic Boom experiments--from the languid Silver Apples tribute with Jessamine (A Pox On You) to the thesis record Data Rape (songs composed entirely of Speak N' Spell sounds)--reiterate that Kember's noodling never amounts to much more than its component parts, rare as they may be. "It's not music! What you play is just a lot of bunch of noise and rubbish"--to which Steve Jones gladly replied "Well then fuck off then".