Celebrating a new album ‘Lucifer On The Sofa’ have yourself a spoonful of the world’s best indie band, approaching their 30th ‘birthday’. Ladies & gentlemen, this is…Spoon. (This article has been revised and updated after our conversation with Britt Daniel in February 2022!).
Words & curation by Keith, cover art by Mick Clarke, as ever
I can tell you exactly when I first discovered Spoon - it was April 2009. I’d come across a session by the band on the niche online site for fans of very indie music - Daytrotter (since absorbed into the Paste culture magazine). For each artist passing through a recording studio somewhere deep in the American mid-west, Daytrotter had 3-4 live recorded studio track sessions, and the site had some cool original band artwork to go with each posted session. What a great idea! I can’t help feeling that a dozen years later, discovery remains unsolved and maybe has even gone backwards for indie music.
Anyhow, that Spoon session included tracks from the band’s (then most recent) album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, including the song ‘The Ghost Of You Lingers’. I remember exactly - because I blogged about it. This is what I wrote:
This track has infected me. There’s something strangely compelling about it – the way it pulses nervously, urgently along (the keyboard on the track is used as a rhythm instrument, which is a sound I have always been attracted to). It’s experimental in structure, but melodic too – nearly all of the melody supplied by the vocal. I don’t think I could ever get bored of listening to this track. It is however, a bit menacing – it’s an anxiety trip – especially with some weird interference sound buzzing towards the end (this is what first caught me ear with the track).
The lyrics and the music could not be any more together. And the lyrics are to a pop song what Pinter prose is to a play. There’s something mysterious going on with this song. The singer’s voice is concerned, reflective. The lyrics are a riddle:
Put on a clinic ‘til we hit the wall
Just like a sailor with his wounds being salted
Come on
I had a nightmare nothing could be put back together
Would you settle the score?
If you were here
Would you calm me down?
The ghost of you lingers
It lingers
I have never got bored of listening to it - across a dozen or so years.
Well, I hope my writing has improved over time, but what about Spoon’s music? Back in 2009 the band had been on a roll creatively and commercially for a sustained period - hitting that rare zone for proper indie bands when the art finds the audience and music finds the charts. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was a fine record, coming off the back of the band’s previously hugely successful album Gimme Fiction. A few years later at the start of 2010, on the eve of their next album Transference, the UK Guardian famously ran a feature headline of them as the ‘best band of the past 10 years’ (Dave Simpson of The Guardian having checked his stats on the review aggregation site Metacritic).
However, all of this success has been largely in their native USA (the band is from Austin, Texas). Internationally speaking, Spoon remains an enigma. They have never quite fully landed over here beyond a cult following. It’s hard to explain, especially given their heavy British influences - The Jam, The Cure, The Attractions perhaps, and The Clash - standout as obvious inspirations. Europe’s refusal to succumb to Spoon’s charms is something of a mystery, which is why I adopted their song ‘The Mystery Zone’ for this collection.
I wonder if that will change. When I put this to Spoon’s singer and ‘frontman’ Britt Daniel recently on the Art of Longevity, he seemed relatively un-phased by it (or anything else for that matter). “We’ve played some big shows there”. Sort of. One of the pleasures of Spoon’s weirdly juxtaposed transatlantic popularity is that we UK fans can see the band in some of the most intimate venues, whereas they play much larger audiences in the USA.
Off the back of that conversation and the release of the band’s 10th studio album Lucifer On The Sofa, it seems like the ideal time for The Song Sommelier take on a singular band that sounds like nothing else around today. Funky, shuffling rhythms, choppy guitars, with the occasional visceral noise riff, all embellished with sonic effects. Spoon often sounds like a funk-pop-indie-punk cacophony in which, to paraphrase one of the band’s earlier tunes (and their only compilation album), everything hits at once.
This is all fronted by Britt Daniel’s nonchalant, nasal vocal delivery and his unorthodox, nervy guitar playing - part of the signature Spoon sound (to these ears). Not a technical player (Daniel’s has explained his right hand technique is far superior to his fretwork), the guitar often comes across off-kilter, in a style somewhere between rhythm & lead. Hear the work on ‘Hot Thoughts’ for example, or the wonky riffs accompanying the closing chorus of ‘Finer Feelings’ (check out the crazy bass twists on that track as well). No other player sounds quite like him, just as Spoon sounds like no other band. Interesting then to see what difference the addition of lead guitarist Gerardo Larios on guitar makes on ‘Lucifer’. He joins along with other new band member Ben Trokan on bass (also big, groovy shoes to fill in Spoon!). As Britt pointed out, the band has never featured a guitar solo like the one on recent single ‘The Hardest Cut’. With Lucifer, Spoon has gone in for a raw, dirtier, live sound - something the band felt drawn to in part as an antidote to the sterile ‘distanced’ culture created by the pandemic - to bring a sense of community in place of the remoteness. Urgency over the apathy. This is a big step away from the studio tinkering and painstaking production that went into Hot Thoughts. That said, the sonic trademarks and experimentalism are there for all to hear, particularly on ‘Side 2’ of the record. Not only that but the album has plenty of Spoon’s trademark experimentalism and melody. Album closer and title track Lucifer on the Sofa for example, is a stone cold classic and might just become my new obsession for the next 15 years.
To my mind, Spoon’s golden era was just getting underway as they were hitting those high Metacritic scores a decade ago. Incidentally, this is exactly when Britt Daniels stopped reading the reviews. The three albums after ‘GaGa’: Transference, They Want My Soul and Hot Thoughts I’ve somehow categorised as a triumvirate of LPs that ushered in a change in direction for the band - or perhaps, a ‘solidification’. Much like Kid A was for Radiohead, Transference (2010) was a conscious shift to more sonic experimentation and rhythm. They Want My Soul (2014) felt like something of a reset, incorporating then new member Alex Fischel on keyboards and guitar. And then to 2017’s Hot Thoughts, where everything came together: the bands funk rhythm stylings, broad sonic palette, appetite for the experimental, wrapped around some really great songwriting.
Hot Thoughts represented the band’s best work up to that point (it is heavily featured in this particular collection) but then, I’m intrigued to see how Lucifer fits into the Spoon oeuvre. On the strength of early listens, it’s another superb LP. There must be something in the water at the moment, with bands like The Manics, Duran Duran and even The Pretenders making their best albums in years, even decades. Spoon seem right on cue, yet their albums have never really ever dipped in quality. They are that rare thing, a credible indie band that have bridged critical and commercial success and sustained a lengthy, fruitful career. Like their fellow US indie legends The National. Like their British counterparts Radiohead. That ability to keep it going through 10 albums (Radiohead are on nine, The National have made eight) is a remarkable thing - harder to navigate in today’s industry than any of us could imagine probably. And incidentally, the band produced one of my favourite ever songs about the record industry - ‘Laffitte Don’t Fail Me Now’ - as previously featured in our Stick It To The Man collection.
For a good decade up until the 2010’s my stock answer to “who’s your favourite band?” was “Radiohead”. And then I changed my answer to “Spoon”, not because they took over in a literal sense (who has a favourite band in this day & age?). When I told Britt this, he seemed amused/bemused to be mentioned in the same breath as Radiohead, but it makes perfect sense to me. It has certainly made for a more intriguing answer and led to more conversations, largely because so few people in the UK know who the hell they are. Well, we’ll see what we can do about that. Along with the band’s biggest British celebrity fan Adam '“Buckles” Buxton, us folks here at The Song Sommelier are flying the flag for Spoon. As Britt says himself “it would be nice to have a hit” and wouldn’t it just - it would be a start to hear the band more on UK radio for a start (another black mark radio!). Meantime we can be grateful that when it comes to having a hit, it’s a good thing Spoon doesn’t need one.
I’ve gone with their more accessible funkier side for the first half of this playlist - Spoon you can dance to or even to run to. But by the time we get towards the final third, we give way to their more experimental side, before the inevitable conclusion that is ‘Ghost Of You’. It does linger.
So friends…welcome to your new favourite band!
Lucifer On The Sofa is out now buy it on Bandcamp to enjoy the amazing artwork by Edel Rodriguez and, the music dudes!