Album Review: Spiritualized - And Nothing Hurt

Is anyone more of a perfectionist than Jason Pierce?

The man spent a whole year mixing his masterpiece Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. Now he's written and recorded And Nothing Hurt in its entirety in an upstairs room of his East London home in a painstaking attempt to capture the sound of recent live performances - which have featured brass sections, orchestras and choirs - without a band or budget worthy of the name.

Pierce has partially backtracked on his statements that due to his obsessive zeal for perfection, this might be the final Spiritualized album. But it is nonetheless a Herculean one-man effort. The results are so immaculately detailed. It's hard to believe the orchestral swells of Damaged are the work of one man, and the extended freakout that closes The Morning After - a sort of sequel to 2012's Hey Jane - is a miracle of seamless overdubs that's so cohesive you'd swear it was the sound of a large band jamming together.

Should this turn out to be his final record, however, Pierce will have left us with a warm, occasionally sentimental document of true, enduring beauty.