SPIRITUALIZED'S mountain-climbing songs have often taken you to heaven, but surely not as close as Jason Pierce came.

Struck down by double pneumonia, after penning the words and tunes for Spiritualized's sixth studio album, he spent two weeks in intensive care nearer death than life, and it took another two years to complete the record. Hence the punning title of Songs In A & E and the album artwork's imagery of needle drips when Pierce has, how shall we say, previously been more associated with the lysergic qualities of drugs.

The songs now seem prescient, but then Pierce has always written about life on the edge (three numbers here have "fire" in the title). The voice is more cracked, harsher, and thematic repetition has set in to the point of rigor mortis, although it is a welcome surprise to hear Pierce make reference to war in the opening Sweet Talk.

His reaction to his near-death experience must wait for the next album, but the ventilator apparatus on Death Take Your Fiddle is the most vulnerable-sounding sonic percussion of all time.

Maybe that will spark more experimentation from Pierce, who needs a new horizon.

David Gedge once benefited from such an approach, leaving Leeds for the snowy Minnesota studios of the relatively unknown indie sound engineer Steve Albini for The Wedding Present's Sea Monsters album, a grunge landmark in 1991. Albini was to work a different, cinematic magic on Gedge's subsequent Cinerama project, and now that the Yorkshire agony uncle is settled in America himself, Gedge has drunk from Albini's well in Chicago once more.

Alas, he sounds like he is down the well, so low is his voice in the mix that the album could be called Deep See Monsters. What a shame, because the scowling guitars still whip like Doris Day's Calamity Jane, and no-one nails the kiss and curse of relationships like Gedge as he nears 50.