Pure Phase: the Spiritualized album everyone skips, and shouldn't

Every great discography has one. The record that gets skipped. The one that's neither the breakthrough nor the masterpiece, just the thing in between, the album people mean when they say "and then there's that other one." For Spiritualized, that record is Pure Phase, and the consensus that it doesn't matter is wrong.

Some context on the skip. Pure Phase came out in March 1995 on Dedicated Records. The album before it, the band's debut, is the one that announced Jason Pierce as a songwriter who could float forever.

The album after it is the one everyone agrees is his masterpiece, a strung-out gospel symphony about heartbreak and heroin that turns up on best-of-the-90s lists to this day.

Pure Phase is the one nobody fights about. Pitchfork, who reviewed nearly everything Pierce ever touched, never reviewed it. AllMusic gave it three and a half stars, near the bottom of his career. On RateYourMusic it sits well down his catalog by review count. If you only know two Spiritualized albums, it's almost certainly not one of them. That's the case against it. Here's why it's worth your afternoon anyway.

A man with something to prove

To understand Pure Phase you have to back up to Spacemen 3, the Rugby band Pierce ran with Pete Kember through the 1980s. Their whole project was reducing rock to a single trance-inducing chord and holding it. The motto, printed on a sleeve, was "taking drugs to make music to take drugs to."

When that band collapsed in acrimony, Pierce took the drone and the chord and the gospel obsession with him and made it lush. Lazer Guided Melodies was the soft landing. But by 1995 his marriage to keyboardist Kate Radley was quietly falling apart (she left him for Richard Ashcroft of The Verve, which is the kind of detail you don't forget once you know it), and Pure Phase is the sound of a man who has stopped writing pop songs and started building weather systems.

The two-mix trick

Here is the thing that makes Pure Phase genuinely odd, and the reason it sounds like nothing else. Pierce couldn't decide between two different mixes of the album, so he used both. His own explanation: "We mixed the tracks twice but I couldn't decide which one I liked better so we said let's have them both." The two mixes run in parallel, panned across the stereo field, slightly out of phase with each other. The title is a literal description of the production.

The effect is hard to describe and obvious once you hear it. Everything shimmers and beats against itself, like two copies of the same band playing in adjacent rooms. Pierce compared the feeling to "driving as fast as you can in torrential rain." On headphones it's almost disorienting. It is also the most committed bit of studio craft of his career, and it's the reason the album rewards the close listen it rarely gets.

The songs underneath the haze are real, too. "Medication" is a proper single buried in fog. "Lay Back in the Sun" is the prettiest thing here. The Balanescu Quartet drift through the strings. And the album keeps dissolving into instrumental drone pieces, "Pure Phase," "Electric Mainline," that are less songs than rooms you sit in. Pierce later said the touchstones were Steve Reich, John Adams, and Michael Nyman as much as rock and gospel. You can hear the minimalism in how little actually changes across eight minutes, and how much you feel it anyway.

Why it got buried, and why that's a mistake

The honest reason Pure Phase gets skipped is structural. It's the transitional record. It doesn't have the immediacy of the debut or the emotional gut-punch of the album that followed, so it falls through the gap between them. It's also a grower in the most literal sense, the kind of album that does nothing on first listen and rearranges your week on the fifth. (We made a whole guide to grower albums for exactly this reason.)

But "transitional" undersells it. Pure Phase is the most texture-forward album Pierce ever made, the one where he cared less about the song and more about the air around it. Plenty of the ambient and post-rock that came after it spent the late 90s chasing exactly this feeling. He got there in 1995 and almost nobody noticed.

There's a straight line from this album to the late masterpiece Pierce made with a younger generation of musicians who grew up worshipping his drones.

That's the Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders record, the one where a club producer and an 80-year-old saxophonist build a 46-minute piece out of a single looping motif. It's not a Spiritualized record, but it lives in the same headspace Pure Phase built, and Pierce's whole lineage runs through our spiritual jazz guide. The man was reaching for the cosmos with two mixes and a string quartet a quarter-century before anyone called it that.

So here's the ask. If you've heard the two famous Spiritualized albums and stopped, go back for the one in the middle. Put it on loud, on headphones, and let the two mixes argue with each other. Then come rate it and tell me whether the consensus has it right. I think it's been wrong about this record for thirty years, and I'd like the company.