Word: albums
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...album closes with “Take Care,” which encapsulates the album’s exploration of the glowing, growing, capital “L” kind of Love—“It’s no good unless it’s real, hill sides burning / Wild-eyed turning til we’re running from it.” The ultimate fade-out ends the LP on a thoroughly satisfying note...
With their 2007 album “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” Britt Daniel and Spoon came dangerously close to being thrust from the not-quite-popular middle ground they had inhabited for at least a decade. 2002’s “Kill the Moonlight” was a critical favorite and 2005’s “Gimme Fiction” was the album that launched a thousand soundtracks, but “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” was, perhaps inadvertently, tailor-made for success in 2007 (The stripped-down rock...
It’s hard not to look at Spoon’s new album, “Transference,” as something of a reaction to that success. “Before destruction a man’s heart is haughty,” Daniel, quoting Proverbs, begins the album. With his penchant for writing rock music about rock music, the intention to step back a bit seems clear. And throughout “Transference,” the elements that made its predecessor an instant classic—horns, conventional pop structure, songs with more that...
Tracks like the aptly-named “Miserabilia” off sophomore mini-album “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed” featured intertwining, irrepressibly cheerful guitars and keyboards, chiming bells, and unmistakably indie pop boy-girl vocal harmonies. And then there were the lyrics: “We got nostalgic, ended up filling shoeboxes with vomit / Collected scabs in lockets, hung them round our necks like nooses / None of it mattered / Nobody cared...
...tracks which best exemplify this change populate the middle of the album. The brilliant “Plan A” retains some of the catchy, endearing elements—anchored by lead singer Gareth’s nasal vocals—that made Los Campesinos! likeable to begin with, but channels them into a two-minute blast of chaotic noise; a mash of throat-straining screeches and crackling guitar. “Plan A” is a statement—this is not the same band that, only two years ago, winnowed their way into the hearts...