Streaming Audio Killed the Video Star: Spoon Coming to Vancouver!

The perpetual head cold of Britt Daniel has reared its phlegmy maw yet again, this time in the form of stupid album title of the month Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. His nasally vocal-designs on rock and roll plod forward, untouched by modern medicine (Benadryl, a Kleenex) leaving "Ga" to dribble along freely only to be restrained with a sniffling inhale. Gentle reader, I know you've been thinking, "What's a Ga?" "What are multiple Ga?" "Why Ga?" "Where did I leave my keys?" Well, here's my chance to cure you of your ignorance: Just try not to think about it, because they certainly didn't. And second drawer, bottom right.

Spoon has a few trademarks, not least of which is their meticulous, metronome-like precision which serves as the foundation of most of their albums. They can essentially be summed up as a band that makes use of the standard 4/4 format by merging fairly intricate layering with minimal instrumentation. And they are great at this. But more importantly they are a band who are thoroughly practiced in the mechanics of basic rock and roll, having created a science of making simple, well-arranged songs catchy.

It's their aptitude for meticulously crafted albeit incomplex arrangements that we should focus on when comparing their past albums to their current. I say this because Ga Ga manages to simultaneously stray from the path they set out within the past few albums while mimicking certain aspects of arrangement specific to both Kill the Moonlight and Girls Can Tell. While it follows the same philosophy of creating a large-scale syncopated percussion backdrop the band obscures this with the occasional brass section and American Bandstand-like Motown inclinations. Instead of his guttural yelps and grunts which made up the majority of vocals on previous albums, Daniel spends the majority of his time crooning over the lyrics smoothly. While the drum and guitar compositions still follow a staccato path, Ga Ga prefers to center its focus on fuller sounding instrumentation than spidery sparse production. But these are only slight deviations in comparison to what Ga seems to lack most essentially: rawly catchy rock and roll.

Spoons stand-out songs of past albums have always been their most minimal. Both The Way We Get By and I Turn My Camera On combined simplistic syncopated rhythms and tidy guitar-plucking which drove the song's foot-tapping base. Yet with this album, Spoon have decided to play with both instrumentation and production in a way that complicates the music more than it would technically need, making each song on the album come across as a vaguely impressive versions of Spoons less impressive songs from the past ten years.

Ga is certainly not a musical misstep: it follows the core musical habits of Spoon's past albums while basically fattening the structural elements with more instruments and production value. When not experimenting with Motown-lite brass sections, Spoon takes pages from its past work for influence and tweaks them to fuller production. But in polishing the Spoon formula I can't help but think that they aren't so much maturing out of a formula they have cultivated over the years so much as diluting the raw and infective melodic format that they have perfected in the past.

Look out for Spoon coming to the Commodore September 7th