In 1976, Lester Bangs greeted the Rolling Stones minor album Black and Blue with a sense ironic relief. “They really don’t matter or stand for anything, ” he wrote, “which is certainly lucky for both them and us. I mean, it was a heavy weight to carry for all concerned. This is the first meaningless Stones album, and thank god!” Slightly less witheringly (but only just so), The Onion’s Noel Murray writes of Spoon’s latest long player, “For those who thought Spoon’s one-two punch of Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight marked the group as a contender for the ‘Best American Band Of The ’00s’ label, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga may be a disappointment.
It’s not as bad as all that. But it doesn’t sound like the Next Great Statement from a band that has been making instant classics since 1999’s Series of Sneaks. But, now that I think about it, none of Spoon’s records have ever grabbed me on the first listen. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was on its fifth spin on my HiFi while I was writing and deleting much of what was going to be this review. It’s a lot better than all that.
The usual hallmarks of a Spoon record – tense rising action punctuated by the occasional raveup, and a minimalist style that emphasizes the silence in between the musical notes – are largely missing. What we have instead is an album by a band in transition. Building upon “I Turn My Camera On,” half the songs on this record – “Don’t You Evah,” “Rhythm & Soul,” “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” and “Finer Feelings” – ride a similar icy cold R&B groove. These songs are pure Sex – perverse, sweaty, disaffected Sex. The triumph of groove and feeling over song craft perhaps marks Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga as Spoon’s Black and Blue. Would Lester Bangs hear the end of Spoon’s trailblazing period in this disc?
Like no band that I can think of, Spoon was completely made by a single piece of rock criticism, Camden Joy’s millennial summing up of the 90’s varied Next Big Things and how they all ultimately came up short of reinventing rock and roll. Joy, of course, pinned her hopes on Spoon after Elektra dumped them and their power pop record, Series of Sneaks. Who could have predicted the left turn that was the minimalism of Girls Can Tell? Perhaps Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the beginning of a similar stylistic change, Spoon’s own “plastic soul” period. Or, perhaps, having failed to reinvent and save rock n roll, Spoon has settled down to put out good records that make the pretty girls dance and swoon.