Spoon “Transference”
Spoon – Tranference
Spoon have been toying around with minimalism for awhile now. Actually, ‘toying’ might not be the apt term here since it’s become the way in which people like me choose to describe their music to people that haven’t heard it. It’s more like they’ve been toying around with being as minimalist as possible with each album that they release. On 2007′s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, they cut everything they deemed unnecessary and gave us an album that clocked in at just over half an hour. Now we’ve got their new album Transference which is probably their most restrained album yet.
But don’t let that persuade you into thinking that it taints their creativity – the songs all follow basic arrangements and simple patterns, yet their starkness helps to add something to them. Much like on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, each song here is intricately picked apart and then put back together until the bare minimum that holds the song together teeters on something bigger. There are moments like Written In Reverse where this works perfectly – it swaggers back and forth (much like I Turn My Camera On from Gimme Fiction) and then we get a track like I Saw The Light, which feels like your listening to a completely contrasting band.
But I’m pretty sure that this was their goal. Many of the songs on Transference are simply included in demo form. It makes an interesting comparison to the slickness of the the past two albums and goes to show that the band never aimed to be a one-trick pony. Unfortunately, the pay-off on the some of the songs just isn’t there (see Who Makes Your Money, or the surprisingly straightforward Goodnight Laura) but it’s still a minor complaint compared to what else is on offer.
The album isn’t as immediately capturing as what Spoon have done before and at times it can feel slightly inconsistent. Transference is also an album where the group have decided to loose the hooks that helped them border on pop genius and score them a whole bunch of new fans. Instead they take what they’ve done before and flip it until these new songs border on the unfamiliar. It doesn’t always work, but it’s always refreshing nonetheless.
