Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

It started with the title. God bless ‘em for wanting to do it their way, or specifically Britt Daniel’s, but the shitty title is something that someone should have insisted and said “There’s no fucking way you’re titling your breakthrough album something that stupid-sounding.”
But in reality, maybe Spoon understands that their sixth album was going to be their breakthrough album, regardless of how stupid the title. The problem for me is that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga doesn’t sound much like a “breakthrough” album; it sounds like another decent Spoon album that’ll probably reach a wider audience because, well, because they’re good enough that they deserve a wider audience.
It helps immensely that Daniel’s is able to come up with some awesome singles to throw into a mix of Spoon standards that are heavy on Rubber Soul-era Beatles and the fitted-shirt-n-skinny-tie new wave tightness.
Those “awesome” songs (“You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” “Black Like Me,” “Finer Feelings,” “The Underdog”) are so blatantly infectious and smart that it would be foolish to dismiss G5 entirely. That means the remaining six albums are derivative of their own catalog or just barely noticeable for me to even care.
“The Ghost Of You Lingers” goes on for at least 90 seconds too long with the whole staccato piano minimalism and “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” actually pushes Spoon into a new category: pretentiousness. The album starts out promising with “Don’t Make Me A Target” before you realize that all of the song’s initial eeriness is complete destroyed with Daniel’s bored-sounding refrain of the title, over and over and over.
“You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” reminds me of that old Jo Boxers’ song “Just Got Lucky” and “The Underdog” is wonderful with its sassy horns and acoustic guitar. I don’t mind these moments of clear, intentional commercial pop because 1.) It sounds like Spoon and 2.) Sounding like Spoon is still a pretty unique thing. With a few more of these replacing the album’s weaker moments, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga not only would be Spoon’s breakthrough album, it would sound like it too.

Spoon - Live Review

Spoon
Harris Center @ Grinnell College
4/13/07

Grinnell College has always been a weird sort of anomaly among Iowa’s private universities. Recognized as a college that produces an unusually high amount of students that later earn PhD. degrees, Grinnell is an institution that can set one back over forty grand a year for the privilege of getting a prestigious education smack dab in the heartland.
What makes the college even stranger is the town that it’s situated in: Grinnell, Iowa. With the exception of a few out of place stores that cater to the progressive minds of any university, the rest of the town is very reminiscent of any other small town you’d find in Iowa. It’s quite a shock then, when you travel past a farm implement store to all of a sudden see some university buildings modeled in the Bauhaus architectural style.
Because of the high tuition, Grinnell occasionally is able to secure some pretty sweet concerts regardless of cost. The good news for students is that the shows don’t cost a thing. The bad news for the rest of us is that it takes an awful lot of legwork to get into the shows as they’re essentially university events with no consideration for the “common folk” that may want in.
Spoon recently announced a brief Spring tour in preparation for their latest album, the horribly titled Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. A week before the tour was to start, Grinnell College secured a visit from the band for the lucky sonofabitches at the school while non-students were provided with vague information on how they could attend.
Originally, the general public could get tickets provided there were some available after the students had a chance to get theirs. The rub was that you actually had to get the tickets in person during normal box office hours (M-F between noon and five) which made it virtually impossible for anyone with a life or work schedule to acquire them.
A few days before the show, Grinnell made no mention of general admission ticket availability and a phone call to the box office explained why: the event was sold out.
A follow-up phone call a day before the event provided some welcomed news: two students had decided not to attend the show and they could be had if someone was willing to pick them up during the aforementioned box office hours.
For those of you not familiar with the everyday life of Todd Totale, I have plenty of time to kill and plenty of initiative when the band Spoon is in the mix.
The day of the show, I made the trip to Grinnell and picked up the two tickets they were holding. The fact that they didn’t charge anything for the tickets made the drive worthwhile.
I decided to press my luck and ask the attendant at the box office if any more tickets had appeared; I had some additional friends that also expressed interest in going to the show. My question was greeted with both confusion and an unwillingness to investigate further.
“Um, I don’t know what you mean. There aren’t anymore tickets.” Explained the future doctor, as he struggled to leave his laptop screen to make eye contact with me.
“Never mind then.” I replied, relieving him of any additional work as a box office attendant.
Minneapolis’ Mouthful of Bees and the Quad Cities’ Driver of the Year opened and, where normal shows would find the crowd milling around away from the stage before the headliners appeared, the students at Grinnell planted themselves close to the stage throughout the show and both bands were warmly received.
I also kept waiting for signs that the “sold out” crowd would appear, but even as the night progressed there was plenty of open space for additional people.
And give it to Grinnell for providing ample security personnel (read: students wearing black t-shirts that said “Security” on them) for the event. Seriously, there was at least one security person for every ten people, which was hilarious as there was no alcohol served at the event and the students were fairly well behaved throughout the evening.
I did see one group of ruffians sneak a bottle of wine into the gymnasium (that’s, essentially, what the Harris Center is by the way) and pass it around her friends. I guess that sneaking in a flask of whiskey to mix with the available soda that was being served would have seemed a little too “ghetto” for these privileged kids.
It was a weird experience to say the least. Some people dressed up for the occasion and the majority of them acted as if this was one of the biggest social gatherings of the year. The audience was especially appreciative once Spoon made their way on stage.
Now two things could have happened during the Spoon performance. Since it was their first show in quite some time, the band could have been extremely sloppy and needing that extra week of rehearsal. The other alternative would be that the band was rested and ready to play.
It was, after all, a pretty cushy gig for our boys from Austin. The least they could do is rock the joint.
Surprisingly, Spoon only pulled three tracks from the upcoming release. So with a catalog heavy set, the band seemed fairly rehearsed and tight throughout their lengthy set.
On only a couple of occasions did leader Britt Daniel falter: a forgotten verse here and starting a song in the wrong key there. On both accounts, the bass player was present to poke fun at him, probably because both mistakes were on older material.
They dipped heavily from the last three albums with “I Turn My Camera On” and “The Way We Get By” getting the biggest reaction from the crowd, particularly when Daniel’s explained that the latter song was about “getting high in the back seat of a car” He then pleaded “If anyone can help us out with that….See us after the show. We need it. Seriously.”
It was obvious, both from Britt’s stage banter and from the band’s overall performance, that they were in jovial spirits and appreciative of the attention that the show organizers placed on them. Several times he mentioned that it had been a while since they played in Iowa and how nice it was to play for such an approving crowd.
Perhaps because of this buoyant mood, the band treated Grinnell to a lengthy 18 song set and returned for a 3 song encore.
As far as insights into the forthcoming album, there’s really no hint of any dramatic changes in the new material; the latest songs segued nicely into the songs of the last three albums. How the album holds up will ultimately be decided with how it’s produced, as it blended nicely with their older material in a live setting.
Admittedly, some of the crowd’s almost immature admiration and childish social skills (several in attendance did silly dances with each other throughout the performance, hinting at a little bit at the fact that they hadn’t been to too many rock shows in the past) raked against me at times, but it wasn’t nearly as irritating as tolerating the drunken behavior that one is bound to encounter at a legitimate rock club.
Instead, it was easy to understand how the kids could get so riled up. As prestigious as Grinnell College is, it’s still located in the middle of nowhere. And any time you can get a band like Spoon to play in your gymnasium for free, well hell, I’d get a little worked up too.

Setlist:
Don’t You Evah
My Mathematical Mind
Stay Don’t Go
Lines In The Suit
Rhthm and Soul
The Beast and Dragon, Adored
Me and the Bean
Fitted Shirt
Black Like Me
I Turn My Camera On
Paper Tiger
Don’t Make Me A Target
Vittorio E
The Two Sides Of Monsieur Valentine
They Never Got You
I Summon You
The Way We Get By
Jonathan Fisk
Encore:
(Song #1 Can’t remember)
(Song #2 Can’t remember)
Small Stakes

Tracklist for the upcoming album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga:
1.) Don't Make Me a Target
2.) The Ghost of You Lingers
3.) You Got Yr Cherry Bomb
4.) Don't You Evah
5.) Rhthm and Soul
6.) Eddie's Ragga
7.) The Underdog
8.) My Little Japanese Cigarette Case
9.) Finer Feelings
10.) Black Like Me

Spoon-Gimmie Fiction

If you’re like me, Spoon’s 2002 release “Kill The Moonlight” took you completely by surprise. Typically, most bands become too bitter, too fractured to really rebound from a major label dropping. Their fans, typically, become too uncaring of such a drama to really give a shit about a band having their feelings hurt by the aftermath of a R.I.F. at WEA. Being dropped by a major was probably the best thing that ever happened to Spoon: “Kill the Moonlight” plays like a classic on the cusp of larger acclaim. In short, it sounds like a call up from the farm league rather than an effort of a band who’s time in the majors had come and gone.
And for that Cinderella story, Spoon suddenly found themselves the dubious distinction of trying to top themselves. Considering how good “Kill the Moonlight” was/is, it’s no shock then how their latest, “Gimme Fiction” comes up a few songs short of “Moonlight’s” majesty. That much you should know before entering into their latest, but it shouldn’t prevent you from hearing what they’re doing now. Because any band that possesses as much knowledge about rock music as Spoon does, deserves to have more attention than Soundscan currently acknowledges.

While “Kill the Moonlight” examined some insanely catchy medlodic patterns, “Gimme Fiction” replicates that direction with the electric guitar stepping up, front and center. There’s less of a cut and paste feel to the album, but it’s still a little difficult to understand why it took nearly three years to come up with it. I mean, I probably would have been thrilled to death if “Gimme Fiction” took a year to make but the shear fact that after all this time, the forty-four minutes represented here is the best that they came up with, well, it makes me feel a little disappointed. There’s a sense of some songs just on the verge of being finished and a few more songs that feel like they could’ve gone just a few steps further. “They Never Got You” is a prime example of this. It’s a song that maintains a new wave chord progression, but fails to really build a memorable agenda and after three minutes, you’re tired of the whole track. “Merchants of Soul” follows suit, this time with a neat piano pattern that once again fails to get past the idea that it may have made a nice bridge in some other song if they’d put some extra time behind it. There’s also a few Anglophile elements spattered throughout the entire effort but it only points to the sad fact that there’s a ton of other bands out today that focus their entire musical direction on post-punk Britpop and they’re doing a better job than Spoon is of replicating it.
Just when you’re a little testy about it, they’ll throw in a few songs that would fit right at home on “Moonlight” (“My Mathematical Mind,” “The Delicate Place,” “The Infinite Pet,” and “Sister Jack”) and then add a few that actually build upon that album. “Was It You” sounds a few yards away from a Talking Heads song and “I Turn My Camera On” may be the reason why this album suddenly reaches a few more music fans. If anything, I’ll bet you there are a ton of cellular phone manufacturers that would pay top dollar for this song to be playing underneath commercial images of their new camera phones. There’s a reason why marketers would be drawn to it: because it’s a crafty little pop tune that posses more heart in a mere three minutes than most contemporary soul songs do in an entire full-length outing.

“It took its time a-working into my soul/I got to believe it came from rock and roll” Britt Daniel sings on the opening track, “The Best And Dragon, Adore,” and “Gimme Fiction” took its sweet time hitting the streets. The members of Spoon have a good understanding of their rock history and their passion for it is prevalent throughout the new album. I’m still a little pissed at why it took so long to get released, at the same time, I’m glad it’s finally here.