ALBUM REVIEW: Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Spoon
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Merge Records, 2007

Try telling anybody that Texas is where it’s at, vis-à-vis indie rock, and you will usually be rewarded with a blank, uncomprehending look. It tells of an uncertainty about whether you’re deliberately messing with their head or whether you’re merely some kind of ex-Eastern Bloc tourist trying to gain college cred with whatever weird notions of American culture you picked up on Radio Free Europe. I myself can live with either accusation, because the truth will out. Those who persist in branding Texas as merely a safe-haven for beard-bearing boogie bands and Edgar Winter forget the following indomitable truths:

A) Buddy Holly’s glasses were the original indie icon: he emancipated generations of scrawny kids to take up arms in the form of a Stratocaster and thick horned-rims. Rivers Cuomo, Graham Coxon, and Elvis Costello to name a few: where would they have sprung from if not for our man from Lubbock?  

B) SXSW and Austin City Limits. The South by Southwest Music Festival held every year in Austin is Mecca for all Indiedom. If you haven’t heard of it, you probably aren’t reading this review. And if you haven’t seen Austin City Limits, which for years I assumed was some      kind of Grand Ole Opry-type show, I suggest you pay our friend Mr. Wiki a visit. And on the way, stop by Ol’ man YouTube and see if you can catch a late-model Guided By Voices appearance. Manna from nirvana of high-kicks and beer.  

C) Spoon is also from Austin.

New Spoon fans will be startled to realise that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the band’s sixth long-player in a recording career that started with the Nefarious EP way back in 1994. Since then, we find an increasingly slick sounding, and frankly astonishingly-produced Spoon honing their metronomic pop, full of little interludes: bips and bops and sampled sounds over tried and true maracas, guitars, basses and drums.

Around 2002’s Kill The Moonlight, Spoon began to explore the idea of songs that don’t gain in intensity, but shift focus from instrument to instrument, each hammering home its own choppy little groove, from the Waiting For the Man pianos to the Mother Sky drums. The brilliance is in the balance of the production. Every little band these days has access to recording equipment that can produce more overdubs than Enya. It is refreshing, then, to hear a band that prefers to allow the thread of a song to be carried by a few well-chosen instruments, rhythms and interesting sounds. All of which serve brilliantly to convey Britt Daniel's quirky, well-observed lyrics.

Relating a specific experience often has the converse effect of taking a personal story into the universal truth, one to which we can all relate. In a song like Eddie’s Ragga, Daniel comes up with lines such as “He’d parted ways with diction, but this was late last night.” We’ve all met (or been) that guy: the nocturnal close-talker, the insouciant laissez-faire eternal youth of midnight. “And it’s been so long since I’d been suitably high / So we did an airborne and settled in for the night.”

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga has many of Spoon’s characteristic pile-driven rhythms, especially on opener Don’t Make Me a Target, but the surprises really lie in the diversions. The jaunty Motown swing of You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb, sounds like a long-lost Spector production.  The Underdog, recorded with Jon Brion doing a wonderfully tasteful Brian Wilson impersonation, conjures the nu-soul revival of the eighties, albeit in a good way.

In essence, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the kind of album bands need to release in order to survive. From the opening notes it's incontrovertibly Spoon, and yet is no rehash of what came before. It continues the quest of distilling whatever Britt Daniel envisions as musical perfection into its purest form. The man himself probably doesn’t think he’s even halfway there. From where I stand, however, it sounds pretty damned close.

Review by Greg Hood-Morris

Agree? Disagree? Email Greg at criticizegreg@gmail.com