WARNING: I’m no record label executive, so you might want to go get your salt shaker before reading the rest of this review.
You know that indie rock band that could? The one, after making increasingly brilliant and successful records starts to earn its independence from the A&R handlers and veto-wielding producers that may have shaped their work in its early stages? The one that, after convincing the label to trust both its ear and its vision gets to make the record it really wants to make?
It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, there can be high upside. However, with high upside, there is also high risk. Maybe the band’s instincts this time around won’t be totally on target and, without someone on the inside or up top to push back, they end up dropping a record that, well, just isn’t very exciting.
It is my great fear and something more than tentative conclusion that this is what we are observing with respect to the new Spoon album, Transference.
While there is some continuity in the band’s membership, the last few years have seen them move away from being an Austin-centered band in the conventional way of thinking and toward being a loose collective cohort of musicians based in places like Portland and Dallas (and, of course, Austin) that gather together from time to time to tease out recordings of song structures designed by frontman Britt Daniel. Thanks to the band’s continuing and increasing success, from break-out records like 2001′s Girls Can Tell and 2002′s Kill the Moonlight to universally swoon-worthy full-lengths like 2005′s Gimme Fiction and 2007′s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, their long-time label, Merge Records, apparently decided to let the band do their thing with the most recent project. Effectively, this amounted to Daniel occasionally flying in to Austin, working in the studio primarily with drummer Jim Eno, and the band deciding what they wanted to put out and how.
It is an interesting strategy, being so hands-off, considering the label’s obvious aspirations for the records. Unlike most other releases coming out by bands who enthusiasts would consider Spoon’s peers, the publicity efforts made on behalf of the band seemed almost exclusively tailored to major media conglomerates, resulting in a nice New York Times profile here and some glowing NPR endorsement there, not to mention a Starbucks/iTunes pick of the week at the end of January, but very little by way of internet love, simply because there wasn’t much by way of information reaching those of us out there in the blogger-land. At all.
What is the result of all this freedom? Well, unfortunately, it is a rather tedious and uninspired record. To be sure, there are a couple of gems on Transference – “Written in Reverse” and “I Saw the Light” are both excellent, and my colleague Kevin recently opined to me via email that “Who Makes Your Money” is one of his favorite songs of the year so far. But none of these tracks really stand up to the top tracks on the band’s previous two releases, and are overshadowed with the far more mediocre selections that populate most of the rest of the album.
Writing that is really difficult for me. Not only does this kind of review go against the overall ethos of this website (i.e., write about what we love and ignore the rest), but this band has been one of my great loves for the past decade. I’ve been anxiously awaiting this record for quite a while, especially after the brilliance of Gimme Fiction and Ga ga ga ga ga, and to hear the band so off and aesthetically flat feels kind of like when a novel’s hero that you’ve come to identify with and cheer for without really realizing it is suddenly killed off. It’s a bummer that shakes you a bit, even as you realize that putting out a weak release is far from the end of the world, both for the band’s future and, you know, reality.
Transference, Spoon’s seventh full length album, dropped on January 19th via Merge Records. You can stream the record in its entirety here and purchases it here.
