Andy Gill on albums: Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space Dedicated DEDCD 034

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Jason Pierce's Spiritualized are a group fascinated - some would say transfixed - by rock history. Their songs borrow classic rock titles but they're less blatant in their stylistic thievery than, say, Noel Gallagher, occupying the spaces in between their influences rather than the influences themselves.

But after three albums, it's clear that those spaces don't afford all that much room to move. Individual songs are static and repetitive, any development coming through variations in density rather than melodic or rhythmic progression. Given such a restrictive aesthetic, Ladies and Gentlemen... is the group's most successful release yet, thanks mostly to a handful of the later tracks: "No God, Only Religion", in particular, takes their cumulative approach to its logical conclusion, slowly building up a tsunami of sound.