Four songs deep into Spoon’s new album Transference and planning to buy more when I get home I admit it. I let my dislike for “Don’t You Evah” color my opinion of the band -which I didn’t know all that well. Spoon have released seven albums and I only know Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga at all well. I’ve heard tracks here and there but nothing stuck with me and prior to Transference the only song I’d liked was “The Underdog” -though I did love the song and the horns are so energetic I wanna move when I hear it.
But I really had no right to dismiss em -I didn’t know em well enough to dismiss em and I was forced to retract a negative review of “Written In Reverse”. Next I bought “Got Nuffin” last year, the single from the forthcoming and now arrived album. It made such a small impact I accidently bought it again today! The song is really a nondescript blues rocker, not bad, and I guess a lot more fun if you are a fan, though the guitar on the chorus is minimal and excellent.
Still Idda passed if it was the first song I’d bought today but it was the third and the other two are really excellent. “The Mystery Zoon” may be the best song they’ve ever written: it’s like they’ve stripped the song bare and it is filled with spaces and the spaces allow the melody to breath and the drums echo the melody.
If “The Mystery Zone” is the best song Spoon have written then “I Saw the Light” is the best song they’ve played. It starts off as a generic rocker (I think the start of songs is a problem with Spoon, the band loves to build and that means the start of the song is dowdy: it’s like I was writing earlier about the first line of posts, Spoon need to hit it faster) but it builds to a crescendo at around the halfway mark, then slows down the tempo and builds back up from a block of piano chords that switch to electric guitar and all the time the drums are knocking you sideways. The last minute of this song is a huge sound for such a minimal production job and in the less ten seconds all you can hear is drums and electric guitar.
Which leads me to a problem I have no solution for. I review everything I can but I have neither the time nor the money to review EVERYTHING so I have to buy song tracks here and there and let my ears decide whether it is worth investing more money on the act.
Spoon are worth investing more money on and I am seriously considering investing in seeing em at Radio City Music Hall.