MAHA Music Festival | July 24th

biography

Hailing from Austin, TX, Spoon originated in 1994 as a collaboration between Britt Daniel (vocals/guitar) and Jim Eno (drums) and a rotating cast of supporting players. Their hybrid of indie and punk resulted in a number of Sonic Youth and Pixies comparisons after their 1996 debut album, Telephono. Spoon toured with the likes of Pavement, Guided by Voices, Silkworm, and Archers of Loaf before their Soft Effects EP was released in 1997. Following an ill-fated move to Elektra Records, which found them being dropped from the label following the issue of their third album, A Series of Sneaks, in 1998, Spoon went the indie route with a handfull of 7" singles and the The Agony of Laffitte EP in 1999. In fall 2000, the Love Ways EP was released on Merge, paving the way for spring 2001's full-length Girls Can Tell. The album was a critical success, ending up at or near the top of many best-of-2001 lists. Spoon released the more musically adventurous follow-up, Kill the Moonlight, in August 2002. The band opted for a bigger, darker sound on 2005's Gimme Fiction. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga -- which was named after the melody of one of the album's songs, "The Ghost of You Lingers" -- mixed unusual instrumentation and nods to Motown and soul, and was released in summer 2007. ~ Mike DaRonco, All Music Guide

Transference is Spoon's seventh album (Released 1/2010) and, at times, sounds like their best: the jaunty drive of "The Mystery Zone"; the rough sugar of "Written in Reverse," with its barroom-rock charge and ooo-weee vocal frosting. The honor for overall excellence still goes to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga for its wily integration of punk-club bang and acid-flecked Brit-pop invention. Transference does not seem as consistent — yet. It can take a while for the always-shifting balance of smart, weird and wild in Daniel's writing and the band's bony attack to sink in and stay there. For now, "Who Makes Your Money" comes off as cold, sketchy funk, and "Out Go the Lights," a slight piece of New Wave melodrama and dub-reggae reverb, strives for hypnotic desire but just feels overlong.

But the bulk of Transference is a provocative blast, a union of Daniel's art-pop ambitions and his band's total-pop strengths. "Got Nuffin" is dirty, jarring buoyancy, with sharp chord changes and singalong gusto. "Before Destruction," which opens this album, is softer and even bolder. It sounds at first like Daniel built the song with spare parts from old Badfinger and Radiohead records. He pits his worried tenor — "I want to believe/For once to believe now" — against the sullen hiss of a high-hat cymbal, a grim pair of droning keyboards and an icy wall of choral harmonies. But the cumulative effect is a dark delight — stark and fearful but attractively strange and melodically compelling.

Spoon may have started out as a young Texas Pixies, but they are, deep down, classicists, closer in their rugged idiosyncrasy and pop-tune guile to the raw-rock searching and hooks on the early John Lennon and Paul McCartney solo recordings. "Written in Reverse" recalls the clatter and swagger of McCartney's first garage-band version of Wings. And "I Saw the Light" starts like a rude son of "I Found Out" on 1970's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band — hammering strum and drums, with Daniel crowing, "I felt so permanently alive."

That's a rare burst of straight talk — Daniel favors more abstract wordplay in his confession and contention. But more often than not, Spoon make direct, vigorous sense on Transference. "And I go out in the world," Daniel sings at one point in "I Saw the Light," "I make my case to the world" — a good description of his 17 years in this band and its still-striving spirit. - Rolling Stone Magazine

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