Alexis Petridis 

Spoon: They Want My Soul review – a beautifully made, multi-layered album

Texan indie-rockers Spoon have critical acclaim by the bucketload, and rightly so, but can their latest win them commercial glory too, asks Alexis Petridis
  
  

Spoon band photo
They seem like a band for whom good taste is hugely important … Spoon Photograph: PR

The last time Spoon released an album, 2010’s Transference, they had just been named Artist of the Decade by Metacritic. That sounds not unlike one of those weird, nebulously titled awards people used to invent in order to get Michael Jackson to show up to ceremonies in the 1990s, but this time it was based, more or less, in fact. Metacritic is a website devoted to aggregating other people’s reviews. By their metric, the Austin, Texas-based quintet’s oeuvre had emerged as the most widely and consistently critically acclaimed of the noughties. This being the internet, there’s been considerable controversy about how the website’s metric works, but the Artist of the Decade award seemed to permanently underline Spoon’s status as Critical Darlings.

Everybody knows what that means: an artist whose actual record sales are vastly outweighed by the amount of hyperventilating copy each new release provokes. Whether their existence is evidence of the appalling taste of the general public or the complete inconsequence of rock critics in the overall scheme of things is a moot point, as is the term’s continued relevance: frankly, if the music press keeps contracting at its current rate, Critical Darling is soon going to mean that about six people really like you. But it’s a phrase that certainly seems to fit Spoon, although Transference made the US top 10 and led to a US deal with label set up by the former CEO of Warner Bros Records; the latter is a little surprising given that the last time Spoon dealt with a major label their tenure lasted six months, and ended so badly that the band felt impelled to write not one but two songs attacking their former A&R man by name.

Transference’s successor, They Want My Soul, has been heralded as Spoon’s push for a full-blown mainstream breakthrough. Quite aside from the new label, there is the use of external producers in the shape of industry veteran Joe Chiccarelli and alt-rock go-to-guy Dave Fridmann, and a more straightforward radio-friendly heft you can hear in the melodies of Do You and Inside Out and the fact that – at a couple of junctures at least – Spoon sound more like Oasis than you might expect from Critical Darlings.

But some things stay the same. Meticulous is an adjective that seems to attach itself a great deal to Spoon, and it applies here. They Want My Soul is a beautifully produced album. It takes a standard rock-band lineup and adds a sense of otherness by lightly dusting every instrument with effects, and arrives packed with beautiful, subtle detailing: the guitar on the title track that jumps between left and right speakers, leaving you unable to work out whether you’re listening to a solo or an intricate duet; the moment New York Kiss stops dead, leaving frontman Britt Daniel singing over a wash of echoing instruments. Everything points to a band very much in control: even the screaming feedback that interrupts Knock Knock Knock starts and ends abruptly, as if it’s being carefully micro-managed.

All this supports some very good songs. If you were looking for reasons why Spoon ascended to such levels of critical acclaim, you might consider that there are few things rock critics enjoy more than picking through songs for musical and pop cultural references, and They Want My Soul offers them plenty to play with. Outlier opens with what sounds like an attack on the actor/director Zach Braff, whose film Garden State probably did more to popularise the kind of unshowy, imageless US indie-rock in which Spoon deal than any amount of rock hackery. “I remember when you walked out of Garden State,” laments Britt Daniel. “You had taste, you had taste.” You get the feeling that this is intended as a very cutting remark indeed: Spoon seem like a band for whom good taste is hugely important.

Certainly, the songs on They Want My Soul are big on showing off the contents of Daniel’s record collection. Their idea of a Beatles cover is I Just Don’t Understand, a minor 1961 hit for the actor Ann-Margret, reworked by the Fab Four during a 1963 BBC session and only officially released 31 years later. There’s always the chance that the title track’s melodic lift from Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra’s 1973 hit Love’s Theme is coincidence rather than a musical quotation; likewise the moment, just before Let Me Be Mine slides into a lovely T-Rexy shuffle, when Spoon appear to have broken into a cover of Queen’s Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But given the audible debt of Daniel’s vocal style to that of Elvis Costello, opener Rent I Pay’s resemblance to Uncomplicated, the pounding, relentless opener of Costello’s 1986 album Blood and Chocolate, seems like a knowing nod; and Rainy Taxi’s lyrical borrowing from David Bowie’s Let’s Dance definitely is, the latter’s expression of ardour retooled to sound more ambiguous and indifferent: “And if you say run, I may run with you”.

Meticulous production, a plethora of clever musical references: the danger of this kind of thing is that it sounds a little arid and clenched. There are definitely moments when that happens, when you long for Spoon to relax just a little, in a way befitting a band named after the longest, loosest track on Can’s Ege Bamyasi. But they’re outweighed by moments like the one when Outlier slowly fades into view, a thrilling mass of taut funk drumming and echoing organ stabs, when the prospect of what you might call Spoon’s critical mass being replaced by mass acceptance seems a likely bet.

 

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