I wanna tear you apart

tough to pick one scene out of a movie so embedded in our cultural DNA that it almost doesn't need re-visiting, as it's always there, coursing through our blood like, uh, blood cells. Let's go with this one, worth Eddie's parting line alone.

I Think I'm In Love

A reissue, by nature, assumes that an album is completely worth revisiting. In the case of Spiritualized's third LP, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, I didn't really need a special collector's edition to remind me, but it and its awesome packaging certainly helped. When the album first came out I got the deluxe version where the CD was in a big pill box that had a tinfoil lid to be peeled back, like the CD was a pill you had to take. On the deluxe reissue, every song is its own individual 3-inch CD/pill, like they're part of a pharmaceutical regiment.

I feel like you'd be hard-pressed to find a more synergetic combination of music and packaging. J Spaceman's lyrics have always operated in that ambiguous way where you can't tell if he's talking about love, music, drugs, or God, and in truth it's probably all of them at the same time. It's all about the electric surges of desire and yearning, the opiate bliss of fulfillment, and the aches of withdrawal. For example, I remember the lyrics to their early hit Medication: "Every day I wake up, and take my medication, and I spend the rest of the day, waiting for it to wear off."

"I Think I'm In Love" is my favorite song on the record, and one that I've kept close to me since I heard it the first time in Denton, TX, 1997, where I had a summer job as an intern at UNT's superconductor facility. The groove has a perfect dreamy churn to it that seems so well-suited for either lying down or feeling the silent epiphanies of a spring day on a long, directionless walk. The lyrics quite nimbly express the double-edged beauty behind illumination - they're all variations on the opener "I think I'm in love - probably just hungry." You're overwhelmed, something new is coming on, you don't know what it is, but at the same time you don't know if it's real at all, or a fantastic dream, the kind that passes through you only long enough to hide the pain.

Couldn't find the album version on youtube so here's an insane live recording: