Vision of Spiritualized Makes Show Less Than Epic

British band makes records that seem capable of changing the world, then comes to play here and falls apart before your eyes. It’s a familiar story, from Blur to Pulp to Stone Roses, and now you can add Spiritualized to the list.

The group’s El Rey Theatre concert on Thursday wasn’t a disaster of Stone Roses proportions, but it was inconclusive at best--a contrary performance that narrowed the scope of its new album, “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.”

It’s an album of the year contender that evokes moods of deep disillusionment and poignant hopefulness in a panoramic musical setting, supplementing blues, soul and Velvet Underground foundations with everything from string orchestrations to gospel choirs to free-jazz crescendos.

But instead of elevating the record’s musical range and emotional revelation to the heroic scale that a rock show can afford, leader Jason Pierce and his six musicians retreated to a rough, rootsy, instrumental-dominated approach that was intermittently rewarding but disappointingly anonymous. On the record, Spiritualized could be the Who meeting Oasis. At the El Rey, it labored to match the basic level of the Jesus and Mary Chain.

You don’t want to dock someone for being independent and defiantly sticking to a vision, but you have to question the judgment that reduces a majestic epic to crude work notes.