the Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space poll

i can't see not voting for "Cop Shoot Cop..." but will re-listen this week before voting. this album is pretty much perfect, more later.

is this album perfect?

not with that boring monotonous zero-gravity guitar drone it's not

"Broken Heart"

want to vote 'i think i'm in love' but the albert hall version is soooo much better

um

the answer's probably 'broken heart' or 'cop shoot cop' or 'electricity' or maybe 'stay with me' but this album, especially in comparison to the rest of the Spz catalogue, is mad, mad overrated imo

those 4 songs are pretty good but i never get the compulsion to listen to this album, unlike other spz material

pitchfork are menks

n.b. this album has aged far worse than any Spz release up to and including LICD*, in that it sounds completely and irrevocably of its time and the worse for it. i firmly believe this and if someone would like to explain the love for this/complete ignorance of the infinitely superior pure phase, fire away

*whose songwriting is on the whole (the twelve steps being a glaring exception) several notches above this and whose keyboardist is a bona fide musical genius

How did you miss 'Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Polling in Space' thread title?

a) I Think I'm In Love
b) I think I'm in love.

i firmly believe this and if someone would like to explain the love for this/complete ignorance of the infinitely superior pure phase Lazer Guided Melodies, fire away

Fixed.

Never gets better than the opening track.

For most of the decade I would have voted for "I Think I'm In Love," but I may just go for the title track (esp. the original "Elvis" version). Have to think about this.

i don't knock LAGWAFIS for not being LGM. LAGWAFIS is a mere album, LGM is the word of god. that said, my instinct is towards "i think i'm in love" but "broken heart" has very much grown on me over the years.. as has "cool waves". dude didn't need to make 3 more awful variations on this album through the 2000s, though.

Yeah, LGM >>>>>>>> Ladies and Gents

Best-ever Spz album though is still Fucked Up Inside.

i was at the Fucked Up Inside show. they were one of the opening bands for The Jesus and Mary Chin's Rollercoaster tour. it happened in Hollywood but Mary Chain ended up owing that night.

Best-ever Spz album though is still Fucked Up Inside.

Won't argue the point. Think my fave Spz. release of all is the "Medication" 12"

whabbout feel so sad eh folks

i was at the Fucked Up Inside show. they were one of the opening bands for The Jesus and Mary Chin's Rollercoaster tour. it happened in Hollywood but Mary Chain ended up owing that night.

I was at the same show at the Palladium and I have to respectfully declare you insane. Easily the worst JAMC show I've seen (which includes the breakup/fight show at House Of Blues, and daytime at Lollapalooza) and right at the apex of their "lazy sods can't fucking be bothered" phase.

Also, FUI pulls from both the LA and SF shows.

think bee ok meant 'owing' as typed rather than 'owning' - as in w/o spz they'd have been sunk

whabbout feel so sad eh folks

Love the version on the "Medication" 12" that crashes into that massive organ splat.

clearly i gotta get the complete works, the medication 12" and fucked up inside

fwiw LGM grows on me every time i hear something from it

yeah, i forgot a letter, happens too much on this board and i can't edit posts.

i have seen Mary Chin around eight but that night is embedding in my head. they put their foot on the gas and didn't let up all night. Spiritualized were amazing as were Curve but i loved the Mary Chain show that night. also didn't know they mixed shows, i thought i was all done at the Los Angeles show.

Actually Complete Works 1 will get you the Medication and Electric Mainline EPs. Think you can find inexpensive copies on eBay still.

I wish a full version of the FUI show was released. I know they also played "If I Were With Her Now" that night and maybe "Take Your Time"

Having also been at that show, in order more or less:

Medicine: only saw the last few seconds
Spz: pretty goddamn great
Curve: GODS
JAMC: ...well I remember the opening film and they started with "Catchfire" and then I remember absolutely nothing else about the set.

I await a another half-dozen Curve thread revivals.

Funny thing I remember about Curve then (other than just destroying everything in site) was Halliday looking like she was within seconds of punching out one of the on-stage sound guys.

GUHH I LOVE THE ELECTRIC MAINLINE EP SO MUCH!!! Had this absolutely greater-than-life experience this past summer when I was walking to meet someone for dinner, and it was about to rain and the sky was as dark as could be (to the point of being way eerie), but it was still totally dry and warm, and I was blasting "Electric Mainline" and it felt so surreal.

I may just go for the title track (esp. the original "Elvis" version)

No question. I love it so much.

i voted title track. parts of this album haven't aged well with me, but that one gets me every time.

I love the "Elvis" version of the title track too but I'm also a cheesy mf cuz I still love "Broken Heart"

Never gets better than the opening track.

― Tied Up In Geir (Geir Hongro), Tuesday, March 9, 2010 8:45 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

uh, Geir OTM?

Pure Phase is their best studio LP & Royal Albert Hall live album is my overall favorite. Agree w/ Snrub & Elvis abaout the brilliance of FUI & the Medication EP too.

This is a really good one too fwiw. I just never really understood why this record was singled out so boldly. My take on it at the time was that it just that a lot of ppl just weren't paying attention to the S3/Sp/Sp aesthetic up until that point, for whatever reason.

Can anyone YSI 'Elvis' ver. of title track?

new edition actually uses Elvis version, supposedly

(pretty sure I first heard it YSIed here btw)

"Broken Heart". It's got one of those lyrics, the kind that people like M.Ward manage to knock out in their sleep, that is so simple yet affecting to the core.

n.b. this album has aged far worse than any Spz release up to and including LICD*

says og pre-adolescent spiritualized fan l0u1s jagg3r

Yes, this album is perfect - the live show last year was magnificent. Broken Heart was played at my dad's funeral (he was obsessed with this album during his illness), which makes it hard to listen to now, so I'll vote for the Elvis version of Ladies and Gentlemen instead.

I actually think Lazer Guided Melodies and especially Pure Phase sound A LOT more dated that Ladies and Gentlemen does now. In LGM's case it doesn't matter because the whole sound is so out-of-time in its own right. Pure Phase now sounds a bit empty and washy by comparison.

Anyway, it's between the title track, Broken Heart and Stay With Me for me. Plumped for Stay With Me in the end just because I played the hell out of that song for several months, something about the rising bassline.

I heard Electricity the other day and that one really has aged badly, largely because Pierce has been lazily rehashing it at least once on every album since.

i love the twangy guitar-y bits on this lp so 'stay with me' is a contendah. 'cop shoot cop' would be for the sublime last few minutes. but all the squally noise crap has to go. i don't mind guitar squall necessarily, but jp isn't actually that good at it -- cf most of 'electricity'.

i don't know/care if it's aged. I'VE aged so i can hardly fault the 1997 album 'ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space' for doing so.

"Cop Shoot Cop" because the squally noise crap has got some nice horns in it plus the ending wouldn't make sense without the middle plus well it's me

has got some nice horns in it

yeah tbh i have appreciated the noisey bits more since i got a better pair of cans dontchaknow.

nb dorian:

some nice horns in it
i love the twangy guitar-y bits

not for nothing, but this is the kind of in-depth musicological commentary that the friday guardian is sorely in need of

Feel totally "blah" about this album these days. It's not that it's aged badly or well, just that now I hear it as the sound of my once favourite band destroying everything I loved about them.

Not even sure I can be bothered to drag it out and re-listen, it'll just uspet me. I seem to recall being enamoured of Think I'm In Love once up on a time. If that's the one with the bassline I'm thinking of.

For a second I saw the talk of the Electric Mainline ep and thought "ooh, actually I like Medication..." then realised all the songs I was thinking of were on Pure Phase.

I feel like, in a way, a Spiritualized album that makes you feel strongly about it is a bad Spiritualized album. No challop.

I played it a lot back in the day.

I got a 'load' of the new 'version', played once, it's alright.

But boy! Has anybody slogged through the 'sessions' CD pack?

some nice horns in it
i love the twangy guitar-y bits

not for nothing, but this is the kind of in-depth musicological commentary that the friday guardian is sorely in need of

― the archetypal ghetto hustler (history mayne), Wednesday, March 10, 2010 10:41 AM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

Those are pretty much the kind of notes I make the first time I hear an album I'm reviewing.

Actually I think it's All Of My Thoughts.

And now I can stop listening to this album.

Thing is, most of the appeal of this album comes from the fact that the songs are so familiar. Yet if this album came out today, I don't think I'd buy it. Or listen to it more than once, if I had.

Actually, I couldn't even do more than a minute of Pure Phase, either, so it's probably just me. I just had to go and wash my ears with some bangin' techno or something. What on earth has happened to me? Sigh.

Trying to work out what there is about Ladies & Gentlemen that would seriously put off a fan of the first album, unless you don't want them to use any kind of arrangement other than crystal glass rim drone noises.

Voted I think I'm in Love, cos the first track seems to incomplete to win a poll, though I love it

Can you honestly not hear the difference?

It's like the difference between a sublime 85% pure chocolate bar and total overkill of chocolate AND CHERRY AND CARAMEL AND FUDGE AND NUTS AND FRUIT AND EVERYTHING SMOOSHED INTO the same space.

Part of what I love about the first album is the lightness of touch. How every note, every riff is in its right place, perfectly balanced, like you couldn't remove a single instrument without the whole thing falling down and not making sense. LAG... is just complete overkill of "well, if a single cello was good... A WHOLE 40 PIECE ORCHESTRA WILL BE EVEN BETTER!!!"

Also, as I've repeated often enough times, the rhythm section on the first album is one of my favourite rhythm sections of all time. So much of that album is driven from what's happening in the rhythm section, so many of the melodies are driven by the bass, the structure of the song kind of comes from the bottom up. LAG... just kind of plods where LGM soars.

Stay With Me deserved to do a bit better. - agree that this is a fine song, but I never really considered it to be a *true* album cut b/c it first served as a b-side on the "Let it Flow" singles.

Saw them in Detroit with the Dandy Warhols opening right after this came out. It was a formative experience for me. First and last time I drove over 8 hours to see a rock show. They were my absolute favorite band at the time and it was the summer after I'd graduated high school. There was no where to go but down from here, really. I wish I could get a hold of the live tracks from the "Let If Flow" cd singles. I remember liking them more than Fucked Up Inside. It has my favorite version of "Take Good Care of It."

Was that the sold-out show at St. Andrew's Hall in the sweltering heat of summer '97? If so I was there too & it was a fantastic show, one of the best prob. It was like baking in an oven for several hours, but that only seemed to make the coolness of the music more therapeutic. Spiritualized is probably the (non-local) band I've seen most over the years, mostly in Detroit. They had a particularly large & loyal following there & seemed to come through at least once or twice a year back in the late 90s.

kind of lolling at myself because there are a bunch of individual songs on here that I'd kind of blurred together into one awesome megasong

tbh their entire career is kind of one awesome megasong

Pillbox, it was the St Andrew's Hall show and yeah, it was hot, but I'm from Memphis so I didn't even really notice tbh.

I even went to the signing at the record store earlier in the day.

At Play it Again in Royal Oak, no? If I recall correctly, the owner of that store had befriended JS & sort of acted as ambassador for all things space-rock/shoegaze in the Detroit area. I've been to Spiritualized signings there too, but I think that was during the Pure Phase tours.

lol small world gets ever smaller on the internet.

er.. it might have been Neptune Records at that point. I don't remember when they changed the name of the store, but it was right around then.

Correct me if I'm wrong... I always got the impression that this was the album that "broke" them in the UK because:

a) by 1997 britpop was definitively over, grand and lushly produced statements were the order of the day, and this did "overblown" much more effectively than Be Here Now (while also providing a bridge between the britpop era and then, say, the crossover of Mercury Rev the following year); and

b) 1997 was also a big era for people latching onto rock albums as "comedown" albums, and while the dance audience that might have gotten into this album probably was smaller than the rock audience that would have been into it anyway this generated a certain a level of feedback loop momentum. See also: Chemical Bros remix of "I Think I'm In Love".

For both of the above reasons, the album felt twinned with Urban Hymns at the time - only, like, much better. But at any rate if there was gonna be a year that Spiritualized would cross over, it was 1997.

okay if I'd played this before the poll closed, I certainly would have voted "Cop Shoot Cop", omg

Tim F OTM

It was in Royal Oak, don't remember the name. But I do remember salivating over all the (OMG OOP RARE!!!VINYL!!!) shoegaze and psych records.

Correct me if I'm wrong... I always got the impression that this was the album that "broke" them in the UK because:

a) by 1997 britpop was definitively over, grand and lushly produced statements were the order of the day, and this did "overblown" much more effectively than Be Here Now (while also providing a bridge between the britpop era and then, say, the crossover of Mercury Rev the following year); and

post-britpop yes, but i don't think "BHN" had much to do with it. it came out before then, almost simultaneously with "ok computer". iirc both were sold as "pushing sonic boundaries" and whatnot (despite the trad instrumentation, obvious debt to the past, etc, of LAGWAFIS). very similar to mercury rev tho, yeah, in that you could read the music press in the mid-90s and not have heard of either band, but then they blew up lke crack in the 80s.

b) 1997 was also a big era for people latching onto rock albums as "comedown" albums, and while the dance audience that might have gotten into this album probably was smaller than the rock audience that would have been into it anyway this generated a certain a level of feedback loop momentum. See also: Chemical Bros remix of "I Think I'm In Love".

otm. cf chemical bros remix of that one mercury rev track.

For both of the above reasons, the album felt twinned with Urban Hymns at the time - only, like, much better. But at any rate if there was gonna be a year that Spiritualized would cross over, it was 1997.

― Tim F, Monday, March 15, 2010 7:37 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

exactly. plus the girlfriend switcheroo context.

ugh Chemical Bros responsible for so much mid-90s garbage

wtf is wrong with you, srsly

it came out before then, almost simultaneously with "ok computer". - iirc Ladies/Gents, OK Computer & the Bittersweet Symphony singles were released at the exact same time. It was a gigantic chunk of my pizza-delivery earnings I dropped on UK imports that day!

they were certainly within a week or two of each other, may-june time. iirc the og LAG cd gives the release date? but ii also rc that it might be wrong.

og LAG cd - wasn't the special packaging version (cardboard box case w/ single-CD blister pack) available exclusively for at least a few weeks before the *normal* CDs were released? I was a sucker for all of J Spaceman's promo gimmicks back then (& admittedly several of them were pretty damn cool). That cardbox was just a pain in the ass, though.

actually, now that I think about it, this album is responsible for my ILX username: when I started my account, I glanced around the room I was in to find a random object to name myself after & settled on the packaging for this album, which never fit properly in my CD shelves & always sat conspicuously on top of them.

Yeah, I waited until the regular was out.(xpost)

OK, who has the d/l of the twelve 3" CD individual tracks version to hand?

my buddy (who pretty much has as "complete" a Spacemen 3/Sp/Sp/etc. collection one could hope to have, into which years of gathering & 1000s of $$ has gone into) has this, still unopened. I'm sure he'll be buying this ridiculous new thing as well.

FOPP in the UK were selling AMAZING GRACE for fifty pence at one point, so don't expect riches

ha, yeah, but I've just moved 4,000 CDs and am keen to never do it again. And I've got the concave face sculpture version of LICD, thought there might be some overspill interest from the pillbox reissue

my buddy (who pretty much has as "complete" a Spacemen 3/Sp/Sp/etc. collection one could hope to have, into which years of gathering & 1000s of $$ has gone into) has this, still unopened. I'm sure he'll be buying this ridiculous new thing as well.

I never went as far as the 12x3" pillbox, but I do have the 1xCD pillbox (unopened!) and the originally released promo CD with the "Elvis" track.

My brother was working for Vital distribution at the time, who Dedicated went through, and he had a chance to win one of the 12x3"CD pillboxes at a staff meeting, but missed out. He would've given it to me; I've still not quite forgiven him. He's actually got a framed silver disc of this somewhere because of how well it did.

I remember seeing this listed as being on the NME stereo for weeks and weeks and weeks in spring 1997, prior to its release. Think it finally came out in late May? Urban Hymns was late August/September, and I think OKC was June/July time. The three are definitely tied up in my mind, with this being the best (by some considerable distance).

Jeez, I really want a good recording of the full live Ladies and Gentlemen sets. Apparently there's a very high-quality recording form Oct 12, 2009 @ Royal Festival Hall--anyone heard this one or others?

Apparently there's a very high-quality recording form Oct 12, 2009 @ Royal Festival Hall

yep, this is on dime and sounds great. taper was sitting in one of the fancy boxes they have so crowd noise is thankfully minimized.

Will definitely pick it up. I'd love some good Spz recordings but all the ones I've heard were Acoustic ZZZZZZZZZlines ones or just really mellow (like the Royal Albert Hall discs). Recommendations welcome!

I agree with Tim F's analysis except for Be Here Now, which represented the death of one phase rather than a bridge to another. I remember OK Computer, L&G and Urban Hymns being the big, serious post-Britpop triumvirate, leading to many strained references to the impact of Princess Diana's death, the 9/11 of its day for critics looking for real-world ballast in their reviews.

I loved that one-a-year run of L&G, Deserter's Songs and The Soft Bulletin. I got to thinking that every year there'd be another game-changing classic from a group of underappreciated indie veterans.

Chems mix deserves a YouTube embed. Lovelovelove the bit at 5:07 where Pierce appears just so the drums can kick in on the word "falling".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ8bfsL-awY

i've till got the blisterpack, like wrapping for a giant pill, and the advisory sheet on taking your medication

bassline on 'come together' is still sick, that bubbling ebbing descending bottoming out over and over

All the hating on the mad guitar squall in "Cop Shoot Cop" itt makes me want to throw things.

ladies and gentleman we are talking bollocks in space

this is like the fucking best thing tbh

not Hawkwind level best thing but best thing these kids did

in that general soupy sea of drone/snore/shleep/drugs endlessness

Christ has this album aged well.

no idea why it was reissued in 2010 tbh

To get the proper version of the title track on it.

I did get that twelve disc version, one was missing so it was a tenner.

'All of my thoughts"' is about a minute longer.

Y'know, I still think this record is easily as good as OK Computer, and felt just as ambitious as that record even at the time. It's a superior "break-up record" to Blur's 13 too, IMO.

Remember when they won that Brit award, and Kate left her table where she was sitting with The Verve to go up with Jason and the rest of the band, smile, and then went back to her table again?

Shortest band reunion ever.

No, I don't! Did that even happen? I can't remember Spiritualized being nominated for a Brit in 1997/1998. I know The Verve definitely were.

Looked it up, it was the NME awards, back when they got televised I guess.

Ah, right! Yeah, that makes sense... NME put this record ahead of OK Computer in their EOY list, iirc!

Shortest band reunion ever.

The Fatboy Slim tape off the front of the already-split Kate / Jason LAGWAFIS NME cover still holds up imo

It's been almost 20 years, month for month, and against all odds I now enjoy this album far more than I used to. It has… aged well?

Best album packaging ever.

The packaging hasn't aged as well as the album, mine is in tatters.

Was gonna say, mine's completely knackered too.

Same. Squashed and warped to buggery.