The Theatre Royal Glasgow describes itself as:
Opened in 1867, Theatre Royal Glasgow went through two fires before the turn of the century.
Standing tall through thick and thin, the theatre has since presented a wide variety of productions covering all genres, including residents Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet. Featuring a Victorian auditorium, Theatre Royal presents first class entertainment.
On the other hand, Spiritualized (stylised as Spiritualized®) are an English rock band formed in 1990 in by Jason Pierce (often known as J. Spaceman), formerly of Spacemen 3.
The two combined together to present the 30th anniversary of the album Pure Phase. Harking back to an album that took ‘creativity’ to the limits of production, combining two separate mixes of each song and allowing them to drift just slightly out of sync, in a venue that had a quaint look and feel to it but oozed a sense of classic venue design.
As stated across several reviews in the blog, much of the enjoyment of attending gigs is to benefit from the way the songs we may be familiar with are amended to suit the live environment.
On this occasion the album Pure Phase was to be played in full as it was recorded and released, not an easy task with all the benefits studio recording and studio time has to offer.
However, Spiritualized®, with Jason in the role of guitarist and conductor, had help at hand with two additional guitarists, a keyboards and synthesiser player, 3-member brass section, drummer, bass player, 2 backing singers and a strings section of cello and violin.
A team of 13, arranged, almost in a half-moon to ensure they could all see each other seamlessly and react to the signals and sounds coming from their fellow stage members.
Add in an engrossing light show where a full moon became the centre piece of the evening, and all the ingredients were there to have a magnificent sonic experience.
The album tracks themselves offer up a mixture of sonic textures, enabling the elements of the band to lead at times with lush melodies, power chord mayhem, brass led overtures or simplistic repeated phases of musical notes.
The music ebbed and flowed too with the quieter interludes enabling Jason’s vocals to become the focal point of the songs while there were instrumental overloads which reverberated against every space of the auditorium.
There are inevitably songs that stand out for the individual on the night with The Slide Song, Let it Flow and Lay Back The Sun pushing all the necessary positive buttons for this reviewer.
With the album played to completion, a short interlude was followed by a one-track encore, Cop Shoot Cop, which encapsulated almost every aspect of the earlier album.
Spiritualized® are defined as part of the experimental rock, space rock and shoegaze movements. This was possibly an experiment 30 years ago that clearly worked becoming an influential part of music that wasn’t focused on Brit Pop and the media frenzy that attracted.
The visuals tonight certainly emphasised the space aspect of the music though in fairness everyone was on their best facing front behaviour with shoegazing maybe off the menu for the night.
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