Spoon - Transference

When the online review collator, Metacritic, published its list of the previous decade’s most critically-lauded acts at the tail end of last year, it was to the astonishment of many that unassuming Austin outfit, Spoon, were to be found at the summit, bestriding even the bankable highbrow colossus that is Radiohead. Few realised, of course, that Spoon’s run of form extended far beyond 2008’s groove-laden Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, or even 2005’s Gimme Fiction, the cross-over building block upon which the latter’s modest commercial success had been built. It had begun in earnest over a decade ago, when they’d first placed their faith in the songwriting talent of gangly frontman, Britt Daniel, and committed to an unadorned aesthetic that valued spiky exactitude over spontaneity, glacial polish over explosiveness, and lyrical detachment over confessionalism. Determined to command a space they could call their own, independent of any reliance on voguish labels and short-lived media obsessions, their slow march from utter anonymity to the verge of stardom has been nothing if not drawn-out testament to the value of consistency.

So now, with five largely excellent albums behind them and expectation higher than it’s ever been before—hinting, finally, at some serious commercial activity— with the sense growing that this could be their moment, now’s the right time to change tack and get a little experimental, right?

Apparently tired of all the clean lines and post-production sterility, anxious to fashion something more immediate from their component parts, Spoon have elected to both produce Transference themselves and do so relying largely on live studio run-throughs to form the basis of the album. It looks, on paper, like a textbook act of indie self-sabotage, a bravely contrarian finger to The Man calculatedly delivered at just the wrong time. It’s a narrative most of the music press has been content to use as a template, emphasising Transference’s rough edges, raw vocal takes, and abrupt cuts; the implication being, of course, that some complex new element, something dynamic and unpredictable, has been added to the previously elegant balance of their sound. In truth, however, the architecture of the music has shifted very little. Opener Before Destruction might include a slightly fuzzy acoustic guitar track, Goodnight Laura might feel like an echo-ey piano demo, and Written in Reverse might ally their most atonal guitar work with Britt Daniel’s scratchiest vocal, but the overall impression is that any one of these tracks could easily have emerged from the same sessions that yielded Ga Ga Ga... Their music, all blocky bass rhythms and incisive guitar, has never lent itself easily to extemporisation, and in the hands of musicians as well-drilled and methodical as Spoon undoubtedly are, efforts at first-take spontaneity fast run aground on their more instinctual tendency toward precision.

If the mechanics of the music belie the claim to a seismic shift in tone, the impact of behind-the-scenes change is given form elsewhere. Tracks like The Mystery Zone and I Saw the Light seem too content to expend their energy, burdening themselves with loose and directionless ‘jams’ to the detriment of their cohesion. While these sins might not be Can-like in their magnitude, they are indicative of a broader and more inchoate relaxation of the critical faculties. Indeed, the nebulous sense of imbalance, of things lasting either too long or not long enough, is largely pervasive throughout Transference. It’s only really in its final moments, as the propulsive base-line of Got Nuffin picks up speed and doesn’t look back, that all the disparate elements really lock together and a note of sustained excellence is struck. Though the technical ingenuity of a producer might, after fifteen years, be a luxury Spoon can afford to forgo, the absence of an independent voice in the studio, a mediator between artist and audience, has had a quietly negative impact. A new sense of musical freedom has, it seems, sacrificed the very essence of their success-- their calculating leanness-- for no new gains. That the good people at Merge are all too aware of this fact might go some way toward explaining their relentless insistence upon making a virtue of this latest offering’s inconsistency, casting it as the natural bi-product of a ambitious stylistic shift more apparent than real.

Transference is no abject disappointment; it’s frequently compelling and more emotionally direct than much of Spoon’s prior output. That said, however, it’s still probably the weakest album they’ve released in over a decade and one, though likely to inspire eloquent defence from the most devoted of fans, unlikely to win as many converts as either of its most recent predecessors.