Spiritualized announce reissue of ‘Amazing Grace’
Spiritualized have announced the reissue of 2003’s Amazing Grace, which will arrive via Fat Possum Records on January 19th.
It comes as part of the second volume of The Spaceman Reissue Program: Curated by J Spaceman. The album was remastered for vinyl by Matt Colton and arrives with lacquer cuts by Metropolis Mastering and a gatefold jacket by Mark Farrow. It will be available in standard black vinyl and limited edition dove grey vinyl.
Featuring songs such as ‘This Little Life of Mine’ and ‘The Ballad of Richie Lee’, the album is noted for being the most intimate Spiritualized record. The latter track is about the late Acetone frontman, with J Spaceman singing at one point: “He’s got his name on a rock again / And this time it’s the last”. Other tracks include ‘Hold On’, ‘Oh Baby’ and ‘Rated X’.
The recording of Amazing Grace was undertaken differently from the usual Spiritualized way at Wales’ famous Rockfield Studios. According to the press material, Spaceman would present the rest of the band with the idea for each song on the day of recording, with them experimenting until they got a sound that felt right. The core lineup on the record was John Coxon, Tony Foster and Tim Lewis, with the latter being the only one not currently in the fold.
Discussing the point that Amazing Grace might well be the most emotionally piercing of all of Spiritualized’s albums, J Spaceman told Andy Capper: “It was almost the opposite of what I’d been doing for the two albums that preceded it. We’d recorded Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space and Let it Come Down and we’d just pushed things out as far as they could go. And I wanted to make records that had a bit more space in them.”
Regarding the songs on the album, he added: “The idea of the songs was we weren’t gonna keep chasing them forever. Which is almost the opposite of what we’d been doing for the two previous albums. It was kind of weird listening back to it again because I think it’s successful and not in equal measures.”
Listen to Amazing Grace below.
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