“The band topping the list was asurprise to us as well, albeit a pleasant one,” the site wrote. “The Austin, Texas,indie-rock band Spoon may not be the most prolific band of the decade, but theywere the most consistently great. From 2001’s stellar Girls Can Tell to 2007’s, well, stellar Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the Britt Daniel-led group received accolades fromthe music press and music fans for their impeccable songwriting and addictivesongs.”
Daniel calls the honor “pretty wild,”but doesn’t put much stock in it. “They had a very specific formula forcalculating that and coming to that conclusion,” the Spoon frontman says. “Itwas really tilted in our favor.”
Indeed, Metacritic’s wonky, sometimesarbitrary criteria did penalize some more likely candidates for that honor,like Radiohead, Arcade Fire and Kanye West, but it’s hard to refute the site’sconclusions about Spoon’s consistency: No band as productive has so reliablyimpressed critics. Spoon’s challenge heading into a new decade, then, is tomaintain that consistency without becoming stagnant.
The band’s upcoming album, Transference, due Jan. 19, 2010,promises to shake things up a bit. Unlike Spoon’s quartet of ’00s records, thisone was recorded without longtime producer Mike McCarthy, and revels in arawer, unadorned sound.
“A lot of what you’re hearing on therecord is the first takes, sort of the demos,” Daniel explains. “I had thisbelief that those demos shouldn’t be messed with. In the past, I’d demo, thenwe’d go in and re-record the tracks, which does work, getting things more hi-fisounding and allowing for lots of contributions from the producer, but I didn’twant to do that this time. We’ve made four records with Mike McCarthy, and weknew we could make a good record with himwe’ve done it four timesbut it wastime we tried something else.”
There’s always been an edgyundercurrent to Spoon’s albums, with even Daniel’s most precious songs soundingfractured, as if crucial components of them had been torn out then crudelyreplaced by percussion and clatter. Transferenceembraces that roughness.
“It’s kind of an uglier record,” Danielsays. “While writing it, I was getting jazzed on songs that stayed in oneplace, stayed on just two chords the whole way through. When you’ve got a songlike that, the value of it is really in the intensity you get from sayingsomething with so much repetition.”
The new approach is particularlystriking on Transference’s leadsingle, “Written in Reverse,” a terse, almost angry song that strikes a fardifferent tone from “The Underdog,” the jaunty, lovable single from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.
“With a song like ‘Underdog,’ the valueis in the pop sensibility,” Daniel says. “That song has about 30 chords.”
Transference,then, could be a divisive departure for the band, the record that sinks Spoon’sbatting average with critics, but Daniel isn’t too worried about it. He knowsthere’s always the possibility of a backlash.
“It could happen at any time,” he says.“But hopefully it will happen when we actually make an album that’s not good. Ithink this is a good one.”
Spoonheadlines the Riverside Theater’s New Year’s Eve event with opener Jay Reatard.
