Mat Pepino

Spiritualized w/Nikki Lane
Terminal 5
Monday, May 7

Better than: Being in the ICU for six months I would imagine.

Bands that have truly seismic musical moments can never maintain that streak for long—not necessarily because their music declines, but because of a fickle and ever-changing public climate. (Even The Beatles only went for eight years; it just feels longer.) Last night, Spiritualized played like a band on fire—if you'd walked into Terminal 5 and had never heard them, you would think you'd stumbled upon the greatest new band. But other people in the crowd might have been holding the band up to unfair standards that they themselves set years earlier.

He's a notorious studio perfectionist, but Jason Pierce has always led a great live band, no matter who his bandmates might be. "Everyone's convinced he sacks the whole band after each album, but I've been with them for thirteen years," guitarist Doggen Foster told me. The veracity of that nasty, long-running rumor may be why the band did sound so good. This was clearly not just some bunch of ringers able to seamlessly blend brand new tracks with classics, never letting you breathe long enough to tell them apart.

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Spiritualized
Radio City Music Hall
Friday, July 30

Jason Pierce sits on a chair at stage left in Radio City Music Hall in front of a backdrop of hi-watt stars with what looks to be 29 other people. He wears white, says nothing, and only gets up from his chair once, to leave. The onstage excess includes two other guitarists, a robed gospel choir, and a guy playing kettledrum and little cymbals to ensure the live performance has as much gratuitous boom and crash as the music does on record. Radio City Music Hall seems only semi-prepared for how loud everything is.

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Last year, O.G. English space-rock collective Spiritualized reissued 1997's dreamy classic Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, and commemorated the occasion by doing a series of ATP-sponsored Don't Look Back shows around the UK, performing the thing in its entirety. The band is doing the album exactly once stateside in 2010 and, lucky us, they're doing it in New York--July 30th at Radio City Music Hall, where J. Spaceman promises to bring along a choir, an eight-piece string section, and horns. Floating In Space is a beautiful record, and so, happily, is Radio City's striking advertising campaign for the show, which hit the Bowery sometime over the weekend. Above, the fancy black-and-white billboard currently towering over Great Jones Street; below, a close-up:

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