Spoon

Retrospective.

The most eternally frustrating thing for any elitist music snob is to try to rank albums of a band like Spoon. With such a consistent collection of solid albums, creating some sort of list becomes a painstaking process. Is the breakthrough Kill the Moonlight their best? Is the follow-up Gimme Fiction underrated? Was Girls Can Tell never matched? Whichever album you prefer, the task continues to grow more vexing with each release. Add Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga to the list and chalk it up on the Spoon blackboard as another essential album from the Austin based band.

Spoon’s recently reissued early albums, like Telephono, weren’t particularly defining, as Spoon was simply another alternative rock band out of the thousands that popped up in the mid to late 90’s. In 2001 Girls Can Tell became the band’s first release to garner recognition. The album could still be dismissed as a fun power-pop fluke, but it set the foundation of sounds that would soon be expanded upon and mastered.

Since then, Spoon’s growth has been unswerving and has lead quite logically to their more recent output. The seeds were set on 2002’s Kill the Moonlight. Largely experimental, genre-leaping and surprisingly sparse, Spoon began working with different textures and a “less is more” approach to recording. Songs like “Small Stakes” confound at first because they never quite develop into what you’d expect, but instead focus around a solitary piano or guitar body. The same goes for the song that allowed the album to become so revered. If at this point you think you haven’t heard “The Way We Get By,” you’re wrong. It’s been featured in nearly every trailer, commercial and TV spot over the last few years. After just a few bars of the instantly recognizable piano run you’ll say, “Oh, I know this.” Kill the Moonlight reached in many directions, but had familiarity and coolness to spare. The chances of Spoon producing a worthy follow-up seemed slim.

Now admittedly, Moonlight’s great, but a tad over-hyped. The extreme coolness sometimes translates to coldness, and the general attitude of the album feels like a bit snide. Maybe I just find it to be a bit too hip for me. So it was a pleasant surprise when the 2005 follow-up Gimme Fiction spread things out substantially in terms of song structure, instrumentation and production. Fiction emphasized Spoon’s ability to capture their natural essence on tape. Tracks like The “Two Sides of Misour Valentine” incorporate strings, denser textures and allow Spoon to expand naturally.

The trend continues on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The production is precise and detailed, with every instrument sounding ridiculously clear. Many of Spoon's contemporaries choose to muddle instruments under layers of overdubs and claustrophobic production techniques. On this release, and all Spoon albums there is no confusion as leader Brit Daniel’s gravelly voice along with every instrument are front and center all at once. Tracks like “Don’t Make Me a Target” and “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” are the straightforward rock songs we expect, but Spoon still finds room to experiment. On “The Ghost of You Lingers” the band conjures spooky, ethereal images with Daniel’s vocals sneakily sliding from left to right and reverberating back.

Some of the band’s best songs to date are contained on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. “The Underdog” manages to be a sprawling epic of a rock song at only three minutes with brass sections that weave in and out of the acoustic skeleton of the track. Interestingly, Spoon continually chooses acoustic guitar sounds rather than electric on most of their songs. This is strange for a rock band because they still play their guitars as if they were in fact electric, yet another way Spoon stays ahead of the legions of forks (bands who wish they were Spoon). When rock n’ roll music can become so easily watered down or so laughably over done there's a lot to be said for a band that still makes it sound fresh.

by Brett Oronzio

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