I remember when Suede’s Head Music came out, I heard one rabid fan bristle at the notion that they had fallen into a lyrical rut and inability to write a decent hook. “Oh, Brett [Anderson] isn’t really concerned with the songs, he’s trying to define a new sound.”
I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard until this Tuesday, when Spoon’s new album, Gimme Fiction came out. While Head Music was a couple of decent Suede songs coupled with an embarrasingly lame album, Gimme Fiction is a good, even great, album with only a couple of identifiable missteps (”I Summon You” sounds to me like a B side). But it, too, is an album of sound over songwriting. And that’s as much a liability as an asset.
Like in their last work, Kill the Moonlight (2002), as well as their modern-rock masterpiece Girls Can Tell (2000), Spoon is trying for a new sound in the studio, creating negative sonic “space” with minimalist production values. Sometimes the results in Fiction are similar to KTM: “The Delicate Place” is reprises the manipulated acoustic sound of “Don’t Let It Get You Down” and “Merchants of Soul” is the eerie string-and-moog-drenched song that “Back to the Life” should have been. The good news is that the album also pushes into new territory, with the Prince-meets-Gary Numan sound of “Was It You?” and the heavy rock groove of the opener “Beast and Dragon Adored” and “Mathematical Mind.” In an era chockablock with Gang of Four ripoffs, it’s no insult to say that Spoon has evolved its sound by ripping off something new.
Unfortunately these rock-groove tracks don’t live up to the strong songwriting of albums past. Nothing matches the grandeur of GCT’s “Believing is Art” or Series of Sneaks’ “Metal School.” So like the Bostonist reviewer, I’m puzzled why the hype now and not before. Still, anything that gets this underappreciated band more exposure is fine by me.
Sample track: I Turn My Camera On (courtesy Merge Records)
No comments have been added to this post yet.