Amazing Grace

Spiritualized and Fat Possum Records reissue Amazing Grace as part of the second volume of The Spaceman Reissue Program: Curated by J Spaceman. Somewhat overlooked at the time, Amazing Grace is possibly the heaviest and most intimate Spiritualized record. A wild collection of blazing garage rock songs and beautifully tender, sometimes devastatingly sad, ballads. They are songs that reach for help from a broken place, ragged and lonely, in love with a world hanging by a thread. The feeling of the gospel standard that inspired the title – “through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come” – hangs like a shadow over the whole record, and J Spaceman’s heart and soul lies very close to the microphone.Absolute nihilism bleeds through the opening song “This Little Life of Mine”: “This little life of mine / I’m gonna let it slide / I’m gonna let it burn / I’m getting sick of trying.” In “The Ballad of Richie Lee”, a lament to the late Acetone singer, we have maybe the most brutally sad moment of the entire Spiritualized catalog: “He’s got his name on a rock again / And this time it’s the last”.