#2. Spiritualized - Ladies & Gentlemen we are Floating in Space

As one half of 80's psychedelic drone-rock duo Spacemen 3, Jason Pierce was never one to be coy about his musical aims, or love of pharmaceuticals: the band's famous motto was "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to". After their demise, Pierce (keeping the appropriate name of J. Spaceman) formed Spiritualized, expanding without radically altering his previous band's minimal aesthetic and putting out two albums of ethereal, otherworldy headphones music which neatly fit the band's name.

Sometime around 1996 though, the stakes seem to have been raised considerably for him, in every sense. His longtime girlfriend (and keyboard player) Kate Radley left him to marry Richard Ashcroft of The Verve, and around the same time, he began work on his most ambitious project yet, the symphonic rock epic which would become Ladies And Gentlemen. Pierce has always denied the existence of a link between the two events, but history has disagreed, and the critics have decreed it to be a break-up album.

And you can't really blame them. From start to finish, Ladies and Gentlemen sounds like the work of a man defined by heartbreak - whether running from it, fighting against it, or wallowing in it. The forces which have always defined Pierce's music - love, drugs, God - are all powerfully present, and taken as a whole, the album comes off as an epic, almost religious attempt to treat his own wounds and purge his soul.

Musically, it's the culmination of what Pierce described as an attempt at "joining the dots between my influences", following the trail of experimental psychedelia back through the white-boy blues of the Stones, through Stooges and Velvets drone-rock, through the lush orchestral arrangements of The Beach Boys, right into the primeval soup of blues and gospel from whence it all came. The range is staggering, and the execution exquisite - it's Pierce's undisputed masterpiece, and one he's never come close to matching, before or since.

Above all else, the album is a masterclass in sequencing. Listen to the way the cosmic lullaby of 'Ladies & Gentlemen' drifts in through the speakers, to be swiftly replaced by the vicious druggy poetry of 'Come Together'; the way this segues into the 8-minute groove of 'I Think I'm In Love', a hypnotic, gospel-tinged soundtrack to a kind of call-and-response, internal psychic dialogue; the way freeform jazz-noise instrumental 'The Individual' veers headlong into chaos before giving way to the beautiful, disarming simplicity of 'Broken Heart'. It's a journey, a futuristic yet simultaneously old-fashioned conceptual trip that, in this age of the mp3 player, you rarely find anymore.

The album, in fact, arrived packaged as a prescription pill blister pack (itself a masterpiece of design), suggesting that it should be taken in one dose. In typical Pierce fashion, it does exactly what it says on the tin; inside, in the mock dosage instructions which serve as liner notes ("unwanted effects may include: delirium, intoxication, visual and auditory hallucinations"), is printed the simple question and answer which holds the key to his intentions:
Q.What is Spiritualized used for?
A.Spiritualized is used to treat the heart and soul.