Spoon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

By Daniel Johnson
Jul 9, 2007

It's not so much that Spoon are saving rock 'n' roll as that they justify it. An aged beast, its midsection fat with creative stagnation, rock 'n'roll has gotten sluggish, weighed down as much by legacy as an over-thick production style. These days, the case needs to be made for making it all.

Spoon, in contrast, have been on the lean path back to vitality for years, with a soul-through-minimalism approach bordering on musical asceticism which rethinks not only what rock can be, but what it takes - or doesn't take - to communicate a song (and sometimes just a groove). Their latest, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, caps a near-perfect trilogy that began with 2002's crystalline Kill the Moonlight and continued into 2005's Gimme Fiction, which followed Moonlight's lead by sounding less studio-sculpted, more band-in-a-room, thereby emphasizing just how naked their arrangements really are.

The problem with talking about Spoon's minimalism is that it sounds egg-headed; whereas Spoon have swagger and sexuality. Frontman Brit Daniel's singing mixes cocky with reserved for a perennial cool that lends itself well to hipster-poetic lyrics like spent the night in the map room/I humanized the vacuum or street tar in summer/will do a job on your soul - lyrics that supply the "baby" behind Ga Ga's gibberish title.

Beyond the vocals, a spare, darkly crusty acoustic guitar might strum along to the spectacular backbeat of bassist Rob Pope and Jim Eno (the most invigorated drummer in the game today, with a juxtaposition of careful restraint and fire-under-his-ass experimentalism); maybe Eric Harvey gets in a piano line edgewise; maybe a tambourine or maracas will make their way into the mix; and, usually, a disembodied effect like a crackle or a shower of reverb will gust by for a few bars. But, other than that, that's really it. It's so crazy it just works.

Spoon's genius lies in the fact that their albums sound analyzed without being over-thought. But that's no reason why music journalists, who on the whole are among the band's biggest fans, should overthink Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. So Spoon aren't the underdog anymore - at least not critically. If the praise wad was shot years ago, it's too late to try and regain critical composure by nitpicking what is simply mastery at work. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is proof that sometimes a band just hits their stride; and if they're Spoon, the stride has swing in it.