Jason – œSpaceman’ Pierce revealed his personality best when he sang, “The trouble with the straight and the narrow is it’s so thin I keep sliding off to the side”. He’s dabbled with serious drugs, got clean, then been struck down with a near-fatal bout of pneumonia. Now, on the other side, healthy again, the Spaceman returns.

Gone is the quick-fire run-and-gun approach of previous album Amazing Grace. Instead, Songs in A & E sits alongside the likes of Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space and its follow-up Let it come down as having an extended recording approach. With the songwriting coming before his stint in hospital and the recording both before and after, Songs in A & E is a typically sonically adventurous recording, full of quirks of sounds and experimental ideas.

Yet, shorn of the Harmony interludes, Songs in A & E proves to be a remarkably stark and beautiful recording that’s as tightly focussed as Amazing Grace. It’s not as aggressive – there’s more melancholy on display, while Pierce’s voice sounds ravaged by his illness, a scratch in his throat at all times. But it is words – his magical, elliptical words – that makes his songs stand out; Death Take Your Fiddle and Don’t Hold Me Close may have presaged his bout of pneumonia, but they seem to preempt a major illness at the exact same time, almost as if he knew, when writing him, that he was about to undergo a period of time-out away from his life.

A fire motif is present throughout, with no less than three songs – I Gotta Fire, Soul On Fire and Sitting On Fire – using it as a metaphor for his own desire. That’s what makes Spiritualized albums such events; they each have their own unique focus and quiet determination to say something about SOMETHING. They’re not just great songs for the sake of great songs – they’re great songs that gel as an album overall because of their focus.