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Apr 27, 2021 By Joey Arnone

Spiritualized (aka Jason Pierce and backing band) have announced a vinyl reissue of their second album, 1995’s Pure Phase. It will be out on June 11 via Fat Possum. The reissue will feature reworked green artwork by Mark Farrow, which can be seen below. Also below is the video for the album’s “Let It Flow.”

Pierce speaks about the reissue in a press release, stating: “You can’t really compare this record to any other because of how we mixed it; in such an ‘incorrect’ way. We mixed the tracks twice but I couldn’t decide which one I liked better so we said ‘let’s have them both.’ Both of them were on tape so we spent hours cutting them into usable sections. If you run two things together in parallel you get this kind of Hawkwind effect (phase), which gets deeper as they drift away from being ‘locked,’ so we had to keep re-locking on a bass drum every eight or ten bars and it took forever.

“If you listen to the isolated parts, everything is incredibly simple, the horns, the slide, all these little motifs and they lock together like some strange kind of machine. Something like Kraftwerk was the nearest thing in my musical vocabulary at the time. Great rock and roll music is like systems, it has its own endless cycle. Pure Phase was Michael Nyman, Steve Reich and John Adams, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel music, and it sounds like driving as fast as you can in torrential rain.

“I wish I could do it now, to mix things twice and throw it together and end up with this magic world. It was a thing that was out of our control and it just sounded better than we could have imagined so we chased it.”

A reissue of the band’s debut album, 1992’s Lazer Guided Melodies, was announced back in February and released last week. There will be subsequent reissues of their third and fourth studio albums, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (1997) and Let It Come Down (2001).

Spiritualized’s last album, And Nothing Hurt, came out in 2018 via Fat Possum (and Bella Union in the U.K.). It was our Album of the Week. Read our review of And Nothing Hurt.

Read our 2008 interview with Jason Pierce.

Pure Phase Tracklist:

1. Medication
2. The Slide Song
3. Electric Phase
4. All Of My Tears
5. These Blues
6. Let It Flow
7. Take Good Care Of It
8. Born Never Asked
9. Electric Mainline
10. Lay Back In The Sun
11. Good Times
12. Pure Phase
13. Spread Your Wings
14. Feel Like Goin’ Home

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