Spacemen 3

Let's start from a near-certainty: the Jesus and Mary Chain were the most influential British band of the Eighties. Knowingly or unknowingly (though does it matter?), they gave birth to a unique sound, conceptually subversive in ways already latent in the demonic six-string of Jimi Hendrix and the noise-orgies of the Velvet Underground, but filtered, in their case, through punk and a late-existentialist, dark-tinged sensibility.

From their pop heresy sprang a series of bands that pushed that sound to another level altogether: the transcendent trance of My Bloody Valentine and the “overdose-by-repetition stupor” of Loop.

Halfway between the former's dazed ethereal candour and the latter's hallucinated feedback-noise stood Spacemen 3, among the founders of the shoegaze movement, champions of a music able to make dissonance and melodic surges, walls of sound and psychedelic swoons, coexist. The creature of Jason Pierce and Pete Kember holds a place of real distinction in the landscape of Eighties English psychedelia, since it builds its musical proposition on sounds not exclusively traceable back to the Velvet Underground, or to punk. Pierce has a lucid, coherent, and above all encyclopaedic vision of rock music, one that drives him to seek inspiration in "radioactive dumps" and "wells of desert hallucination" - but we'll come back to that later.

"The Perfect Prescription" is Spacemen 3's masterpiece, and one of the most visionary albums in the history of rock. Its ten tracks (some of which had already appeared in earlier work) form a concept through which Pierce and co. render the experience of overdose in musical terms; it's the sublimation of drugs, not so much of their use as of the experience that use produces. These are stories of drifting, disillusioned young people, let down by life, who take refuge in transgression. Around that refuge meaning is built, transgression being both the means and the end (and the finish line) of their existential path, a tool through which to alienate themselves from the rules of a civil life perpetually at odds with youthful demands and grievances.

Within the shoegaze brotherhood, Spacemen 3 offer the sound closest to that of their masters, the Velvet Underground; the guitar progressions and iterations of Pierce and co. produce a kind of obsessive, suffocating noise-din, a visionary trance in which riffs and melodies end up dissolving until they're no longer recognisable as such. Spacemen 3 songs begin as songs but gradually collapse in on themselves, evolving into black holes that swallow up every sonic marker that once defined them. It's emotional tension mutating into a loss of orientation and a loss of any sense of meaning.

What makes Spacemen 3 so distinctive and innovative, keeping them from being mere Velvet Underground epigones, is the presence - and thus the reclaiming - within their compositions of the best of the rock avant-garde tradition, from krautrock to Red Crayola. The organised, concentric noise of "Take Me To The Other Side" or "Come Down Easy", for instance, cannot help but recall the orgiastic chaos of Mayo Thompson's psychedelic disharmonies.

By virtue of this blending of more or less adjacent sounds, Spacemen 3 became hugely influential, and "The Perfect Prescription", in particular, can rightfully be considered one of the most important records of the Eighties, undoubtedly a touchstone for the following generation of bands (as Bardo Pond, for example, demonstrate). "Take Me To The Other Side" opens proceedings and serves as a manifesto for the album's sound to come; Pierce and Kember's guitars paint a radioactive landscape with extraordinary effectiveness, one in the background building a hypnotic, noise-laden trance, the other, on "Loop", repeating raw, obsessive, minimal figures.

"Walking With Jesus" (lifted from the EP of the same name) is a krautish ballad completely buried in a magma of psychedelic effects, proof that the Spacemen 3 sound can grate even in its softest moments. "Ode To Street Hassle" is one of the peaks reached by the Pierce-Kember duo; Pierce pays tribute to Lou Reed by reproducing his spoken-sung delivery, while the guitar is still busy reiterating the same theme into infinity. If "Ecstasy Symphony" anticipates the ambient revival of the Nineties and "Transparent Radiation" is an ethereal rereading from the catalogue of the aforementioned Red Crayola, "Things'll Never Be The Same" produces a nerve-shredding trance of pure noise, capable of pulverising the eardrums. "Things'll Never Be The Same" also demonstrates how the Spacemen 3 sound could easily have generated long, elaborate compositions that could have done without vocals altogether; but the band always stayed anchored to the song form, leaving the burden of experimentation to others (Roy Montgomery).

The concept closes with "Call The Doctor", a slow, hypnotic ballad, a Hendrix-like blues completely transfigured by minimal guitar tolling and Pierce's dark, anguished vocals. It's the collapse, the point of no return: psychic death and the apologia of drugs as a therapeutic experience. What can be said? There's no point in the usual closing remark: just buy the record.

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10/11/2006