I didn’t think much of the sectional shifts recently employed by the Review-Journal, a cost-cutting move initiated last week in lieu of pink slips — until today. As some of you may know, the Monday and Tuesday versions of the Living section have been substituted for a lone entertainment-oriented page in, of all places, the Nevada section. The compilation of largely wire stories has been, so far, reflective of mainstream pop culture — if a little random, too. And perhaps no single inclusion has been more arbitrary than today’s AP feature on Spiritualized, whose primary member, Jason Pierce, nearly died of pneumonia during the making of its just-released album, Songs in A&E.

Why is this weird? Spiritualized is a British alternative rock group that, despite its roots in traditional American music, is about as far from the mainstream as any other act you could imagine being written up in the R-J (music writer Jason Bracelin’s interest in local and underground hardcore/metal acts — which usually only get ink in the Living section — aside). The act, most “known” for its 1998 epic, Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, has never hit local radio stations nor performed in town; I’d be hard-pressed to find many local musicians and scenesters familiar with it. So, with any number of commercial acts and celebrities making headlines for all sorts of reasons, it’s peculiar the R-J editors went with the Spiritualized story, especially in a high-traffic section of the paper.

At any rate, I’m not complaining. It’s good to see they went with a good story as opposed to a cheap headline.