In »Knock Knock Knock,« a powerful highlight from 2014’s Spoon album They Want My Soul, frontman Britt Daniels mentions the movie After Hours – a great but not-so-heavy Scorsese work the director pulled out of his sleeve in the mid-1980s. Fits perfectly, I mean: Spoon’s discography would look like Martin Scorsese’s entire oeuvre if he hadn’t interspersed loaded chunks like Raging Bull or Goodfellas with smaller-format movies like After Hours. Over and over again. You hardly ever get knocked out or disappointed.
Gimme Fiction
In Britt Daniels’ eyes, After Hours is probably a lot cooler than a three-hour epic because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. For Spoon, records are not blockbuster/homerun attempts or career reboots (see Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, etc.), but simply records that come out every few years; in that respect, the band is pretty oldschool.
Plus, when your discography ultimately consists of such modest albums, it’s much more exciting to dive into that body of work – because not one or two albums are the ultra-obvious go-to milestones, because every phase of your career is considered important. Spoon has never been the biggest or most important band, but Spoon is always there. And they have remained Spoon for 30 years, despite constant minor changes.
The fact that Spoon had to find their feet at the beginning of their career – from the Pixies-like debut Telephono to the minimalist fourth album Kill the Moonlight, the band improved from album to album – meant that they didn’t waste their powder like, say, The Strokes or Interpol. Even after that, the band remained interesting, as a kind of back and forth was established within their discography: the catchy rock album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007) was followed by the experimental Transference; the more direct pop record They Want My Soul was followed by the electronic break with Hot Thoughts (2017). It should be clear what kind of work will come after the latest all-killer-no-filler rock album Lucifer on the Sofa…
First Impressions are Deceiving
Gimme Fiction falls between those two lines – the road to success and the rock’n’roll/experimentation ping-pong described above. It’s not my favorite Spoon album, it probably only just makes it into my TOP 5, but it remains the best album to write about. Compared to other Spoon albums, Gimme Fiction is harder to categorize: it’s neither direct and pop (like Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga) nor overtly experimental (like Hot Thoughts). The best way to describe the work is that Spoon have chopped up their classic rock influences and then put them back together again; in the wrong order and in strange shapes.
The Pitchfork review at the time described the record as »straightforward« … Sorry, but that’s crap.
Never before have Spoon sounded so much like the Beatles. This is particularly evident in the descending chord sequence of »The Beast and Dragon, Adored.« Gimme Fiction is reminiscent of the Beatles’ White Album not because of its length, though the record is similarly diverse, but because of the seething, dark eeriness that both albums possess: Gimme Fiction features deep, booming pianos and fragmented noise guitars, while the lyrics are all about incantations and apocalyptic scenarios.
Nothing is what it seems: “Sister Jack” starts out as a straightforward rock song, but towards the end settles into an unusual 9/8 beat; “They Never Got You” begins with a groovy Motown rhythm, but the very first chord change casts the whole thing into a ghostly light. The Pitchfork review at the time described the record as »straightforward«… Sorry, but that’s nonsense, and only true at first glance. In the album’s best song, »The Two Sides Of Monsieur Valentine,« Britt Daniels gets right to the point: »You think things are straight, but they’re not what they seem.«
