Spoon
Transference
(Spunk)
The music of Britt Daniel, chief songwriter in Spoon, has the neatness of modern architecture. Shafts of light illuminate the spaces; blocks of sound arranged to slice new angles, lines and rows. Spoon is not fussy, though, but focussed. There are moments of raucous, riotous noise – modernist architecture may be understood now as ‘sterile’ or ‘serene’, but many of its best practitioners wanted in their works the vibrancy of the street, the city, the untamed buzz of technology. Daniel, in his way, introduces the messy tangles of punk and post-punk to mannered '60s pop songs. Although both sounds are “classic” now, the best moments in Spoon’s catalogue are those where they are put to work together. The stark and the sinewy, the comforting and the familiar. In this, something new can emerge.
‘Written in Reverse,’ the first single from the album, is a stunning example of this. Here we find the band in peak form, roaming around inside the song’s outlines, the bandmates cajoling one another with brief bursts of sound. Like the best of Spoon’s work, it sounds vital and immediate by virtue of a pared back approach to production. (The paradox: how much work must always go into making something sound ‘simple’.) The drums are the most forceful presence, cymbals splashing and fizzing around a locked-down rhythm. The groove is maintained throughout, despite a bare minimum of instrumental interaction. A bar piano punctuates the drum pattern. Bass swivels and teases once per measure. The instruments stay out of each other’s way, slamming in and out on the beat. The tumbledown song seems to barely hold together through its first half. But Britt Daniel shreds his vocal chords on the chorus before the band come together for its second half, finally gelling the distinct elements. Here we get a brief payoff just as it begins to fall apart again. It’s the type of track that sounds effortless on first listen – but the production nous is notable when you start to examine its constituent parts.
And it may not even be the production standout here. Closing track ‘Nobody Gets Me But You’ is about three songs in one, something like The Beatles ‘Day in the Life’ but more wilfully coherent. (Though, it must be said, not quite so good – that Beatles cut being one of the best pieces of music in the previous century.) ‘Nobody’ rocks on a rudimentary pattern reminiscent of early Talking Heads. It pairs drum samples with live drums, drips manic piano over its guitar, runs both backwards, rhythmically, locks the reversed pianos into a groove and then breaks down to a kind of Ligeti-inspired synth freakout to close. Oh yeah. It’s Spoon. Of course they do. Did you hear what they did with the syncopated percussion? One of the perverse signs of artistic success seems to be that you become unremarkably remarkable.
The music critic’s sport of adjudicating whether the new record is better than the last is largely futile in the case of Spoon. At this point, more than fifteen years into their career, the band’s reputation is cemented as a reliable, consistent, forward-thinking rock outfit.
Transference will only continue this reputation. Now, let’s dance to this architecture.
Ben Gook