The spin on Spoon

Fourteen years and five albums into their career, the Spoon boys are no longer the hometown heroes. Sometime between the Jaguar commercial and Stranger than Fiction, they became the world’s. And it’s not going to surprise you when I predict that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is going to be one of the hottest albums of the year. So rather than simply explain to you why this is the most-brilliant-album-of-all-time-etc., I’d like to play a little devil’s advocate.

If you’re a Spoon fan, or if you somehow have access to the band’s back catalog, make the following playlist (all songs by Spoon):

1. “The Way We Get By”
2. “Someone Something”
3. “Chips and Dip”
4. “Was it You?”
5. “Lafitte Don’t Fail Me Now” (or “The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine”)
6. “The Minor Tough”
7. “I Summon You”
8. “Metal Detektor” (or “I Could See the Dude”)
9. “Me and the Bean”
10. “Advance Cassette”

Killer playlist, right? Listen to that straight through, and tell me if what you heard didn’t sound remarkably like Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. We can look at this two ways, of course. Allow me to demonstrate.

THE GOOD

Spoon’s new album, Ga Ga Ga Etc., excels in rounding up the band’s varied sounds from the past three albums — the slick, moony pop of Girls Can Tell, the minimalist rock of Kill the Moonlight, and the lush classic rock of Gimme Fiction, — and rolling them into a cohesive vision that still manages to propel the band forward.

Ga x 5 can be seen as a nod to the band’s sound, held together by an insistent rhythm section and punctuated with Pixies-inspired bursts of noise amid cool, reverby keys. All of this, of course, underneath Britt Daniel’s raspy croon. You’ll find these staples on nearly any Spoon album, simply recast into one genre or another. This album, by running through each of those sounds, ends up showcasing the basic meat of the band.

This seems to be the M.O. from the album-starter “Don’t Make Me a Target,” political rocker laid over a shuffle whose plodding piano and hand claps clearly reference Kill the Moonlight’s “The Way We Get By.” And it continues to close “Black Like Me,” with its mellotron and stuttering piano evoking past finales “Vittorio E” and “Advance Cassette.”

Elsewhere, “Eddie’s Ragga” and “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case,” while not album standouts, are perfectly good testaments to the strength of the Spoon song. Nothing remarkable happens in either, but they’re still sonically pleasing.

But what might be most interesting about the album are the moments it plows forward into new territory. Take, for instance, “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” which plucks the entire aesthetic of Girls Can Tell, right down to the filtered keys and bell kits, and tosses it into a four-on-the-floor Diana Ross pop hit, with saxophones (which we haven’t heard from Spoon since “Jonathon Fisk”) and even an ELO-style vocoder breakdown. Or “The Ghost of You Lingers,” which rolls up all of Kill the Moonlight’s ambient tracks into a big, ’80s, reverb-laden mess with Britt’s falsetto panning back and forth. We haven’t heard a track like this before, but it’s still unmistakably Spoon. And then there’s Spoon’s first honest-to-God dance track, “Finer Feelings,” which more or less just slows down “Me and the Bean” into a groove. Each of these songs could have easily tanked, but it’s a testament to the strength of Spoon’s formula that they can turn something completely referential into something so progressive.

Maybe they do it best on the Jon Brion-produced “The Underdog,” which essentially lifts “I Summon You” straight off of Gimme Fiction and dropkicks it into a horn-smothered romp. Like its predecessor, it’s an instant classic.

Spoon was heading toward this thematic unity in Gimme Fiction, whose first track name-checked two or three others on the album, but Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga finally achieves it — not through the lyrics, but through the aesthetic.

THE BAD

Spoon’s new album, Gag Gag Gag Gag Gag, excels in sucking. Hardcore. They’ve been dabbling in genre albums ever since they stopped trying to sound like the Pixies. A fairly innocuous move, if a little campy. But it was a blessing compared to an album devoted entirely to ripping off the band’s own back catalog.

Maybe they’re acknowledging that all their songs kind of sound the same. It’s always the same 4/4 drum beat, the same guitar noodling. All this album proves is that they’ve been dressing up the exact same sound and passing it off as moving in new directions.

I mean, for crying out loud, the opener is a lame revisiting of “The Way We Get By.” It even has the same hand claps and piano. Was acknowledging that you play the same song over and over the best way to start an album? The closer, “Black Like Me,” might be even worse, as it manages not to sound just like one specific Spoon closing track, but all of them at once.

The essential problem that this album highlights is that Spoon is not all that interesting. “Eddie’s Ragga” and “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” are about the most unremarkable things you could ever commit to magnetic tape. Not particularly bad or good so much as just there, taking up space. And you know these songs have been on the past four albums, just called something different.

But what might be worst about the album are the moments it thinks it’s blazing into new territory. Take, for instance, “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” which mashes pretty much all of “Girls Can Tell” into a Diana Ross song. Or “The Ghost of You Lingers,” which rolls up all of Kill the Moonlight’s ambient tracks into a big, ’80s, reverb-laden mess. It was only a matter of time before Spoon jumped onto the whole let’s-sound-like-the-’80s train. Or, in the case of “Finer Feelings,” the indie-kids-are-dancing-now train.

Do we even need to talk about how “The Underdog” is just “I Summon You” with horns?

If Spoon’s goal is to make its career retrospective box set completely homogeneous, Ga^5 leaps ably toward that goal. But otherwise, it’s more of the same from a band so fixated on an aesthetic, it forgot to write the songs to back that aesthetic up.

(You are now entering the no-spin zone.)

Obviously, I’m of two minds here. After all, Ga and So On lays its influences barer than any other Spoon album to date. This would be a bad thing if not for two things: (1) Spoon has recast the songs well enough so that they sound new and interesting while evoking the band’s past work, and (2) This is maybe the most accessible Spoon album ever. “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” and “The Underdog” are two of the band’s most upbeat songs to date, and the arrangement seems as effortless as it did during the more lightning-in-a-bottle days of “Telephono” and “A Series of Sneaks.” This makes it easy to have pleasant memories of past Spoon albums, rather than lamenting the band for not moving forward.

The trick here — and there’s always a trick with Spoon — is that they’ve moved forward by moving back.