- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Songs In A&E is Pierce's best work since "Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space"--easily his most personal.
-
Some may listen to Songs From A&E and dub Jason Pierce a one-trick pony. Which may be true, but what a trick he's managed to perfect.
-
Although it remains, at its foundation, an exploration of themes that Pierce has long explored, Songs In A&E becomes more than the sum of its historical variants by directly placing emotional vulnerability at its focal point.
-
I’m gonna go way out on a limb and say that this is their best album yet.
-
Spiritualized have always possessed an impressive grandeur, but on this album it is grandeur with a purpose--Songs in A&E is the sound of healing.
-
Songs in A&E is certainly Spiritualized's best work in 10 years.
-
Entertainment WeeklyJust when you think he's taken a turn for the cliche, even an allusion to drug use--"I've got a hurricane in my veins," he sings on 'Soul on Fire'--crescendos ino a string-laden little gem. [13 June 2008, p.70]
-
Pierce ties the dark to the light with poetic folk ballads like closing lullaby "Goodnight Goodnight," making A&E a strange and pleasing concoction of old and new.
-
In sick times, with extreme politics on the rise and a fright-wigged bad Tory joke in charge of London, this is an album you can retreat to for succour.
-
Delayed and coloured by a near-fatal bout of double pneu-monia, it is his most moving record since 1997's "Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space."
-
Songs In A&E swells with tender, cautious optimism.
-
A&E isn’t a reinvention for Spiritualized, but while that might be a disappointment for some, the comforting embrace of familiarity shouldn’t be underrated.
-
Songs in A&E, finds an eerie strength in quietude and mortality.
-
The WireThat this is Spiritualized's most vital and compelling set for a decade suggests that his muse has been galvinised by his near death experience. [May 2008, p.61]
-
It runs a little long, and it doesn't break much new thematic ground, but the album's great depth of feeling and its sure-footed execution outshine such minor problems.
-
The album may not set the world on fire like "Ladies and Gentlemen," but it stands as the best Spiritualized album since that milestone, and a worthy successor.
-
Newly focused energy, willfully restrained arrangements, and taut compositions give the set a sheer emotional power that no Spiritualized recording has ever displayed before, making it, quite possibly, their finest outing yet.
-
Spiritualized always had that out-of-body, walk-toward-the-light quality; Pierce just seems to be doing it better now than on the last two albums.
-
Under The RadarThe songs are punctuated with numbered “Harmony” pieces, small intermissions that, along with the orchestration on the songs themselves, reveal Pierce’s growing skill as an arranger. [Summer 2008]
-
Mostly, though, this is music from someone who's been there and back, and now truly knows he prefers things here.
-
Overall, Songs in A & E merges the familiar, sometimes disparate elements of past Spiritualized recordings, yet rarely comes across as a stale or uninspired career conclusion--kely due to the intense emotion that Spaceman puts into just about everything on here.
-
Pierce hasn't totally rejected quick tempos and piled-high productions, but in the context of the album, the livelier songs are actually the least effective.
-
The result ebbs and flows.
-
Alternative PressIt's an honest record, a welcome return and a confident entry in the Spiritualized canon. [July 2008, p.156]
-
A&E is generally more subdued, but, like Pierce’s earlier work, it’s best at its most theatrical.
-
Truth and parody meshed together in an altogether confusing and ill-conceived manner.
-
Q MagazineThere's nothing wrong with the songs that make up its second act, save that each is as woozy, wistful and gossamer-fragile as the next. [June 2008, p.140]
-
Songs in A&E retains all of the weight of its self-imposed seriousness, its capital A artistic gravitas, but unfortunately leaves the uplift of invention to the memory of Spiritualized albums it so readily evokes.
-
MojoSadly A&E neither draws on personal crisis or the intimacy of "Acoustic Mainlines" [June 2008, p.106]
-
The lumbering, ponderous nature of both music and vocals elsewhere makes you wonder if much of Songs In A&E wasn't actually recorded in hospital.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 27 out of 31
-
Mixed: 1 out of 31
-
Negative: 3 out of 31
-
Aug 1, 2011
-
Apr 11, 2011
-
[Anonymous]Nov 22, 2008Great album, one of their best.