Humanizing the vacuum

Sasha Frere-Jones gives Spoon credit for evolving, but Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga still sounds like the work of a band that once "aped the work of astringent rock groups like Wire and the Pixies, which wrote songs with gnomic lyrics that were hard to parse and were sung over short, stinging guitar phrases." Although I liked Gimme Fiction a lot, it divided a lot of their fans but got credit from bandwagoneers like me because Britt Daniel unlocked his knock-kneed gait, even though he'd clearly copped his best moves from the Rolling Stones' "Dance, Pt. 1." It's not often that I credit a band's diehards for being the right first time, but I quashed most of my reservations two years ago because Gimme Fiction's surface seduced and sparkled so. Yeah, he'd learned to dance, but it was in the bedroom, to Genesis' Selling England by the Pound. Girls had fuck-all to do with it. Erecting a wall between yourself and the rest of the world is the mortal sin of too many Ameri-indie acts; Daniel's immense songcraft can easily seem like formalist dithering if you're not in the mood.

I hated Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga at first, repelled by its insufficiently ironic, too easily indicative title (Baby Britt needs a rattle and a good burping) and catchy tunes that stood at the podium and rested their case after too brief a summation. I resisted my attraction to Daniel's guitar tone, underrated vocal chops (at his best he sounds like a David Byrne-nified Nick Lowe), and the tricky rhythms he and Jim Eno came up with. Lines like "Bet you got it all planned right/Bet you never worry/Never even feel a fright" were a punchline for a joke it was easy for me to tell. But "Don't You Evah," the song in which you'll find said lyrics, collects all manner of acerbic relationship insights, with dandy guitar tones and a tricky rhythm too. "Black Like Me" is even better: channeling the acoustic menace of "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine" and finding the ideal setting for the sound effects that Eno and Daniel love sprinkling on skeletal melodies. It's a sad evocation of summer tar, hot bedrooms, voices in your head, and girls you want so much that you have to break up with them. The song's not a release so much as a window, revelatory in context perhaps (I'm not sure why Daniel places it at the end of the album; there's no friction in the sequence). But it comes closest fulfilling the promise of his best line, one Daniel is too smart to throw away: "I humanize the vacuum." While I'm not yet ready to credit Spoon for "evolving" from "Dancing With Myself" to "Mirror in the Bathroom," there's churn in their slow burn.