The Fat Angel Sings

Working again with Dave Fridmann, the veterans push their minimalism to the max. The guys in Spoon build walls of gauzy synthesizers or drizzling Middle Eastern sounds, then tear them back down – going to work with scalpels of guitar, pop gun drums and frontman Britt Daniel’s sandpaper sneer of a voice. The boys have it both ways on ‘Hot Thoughts,’ making their band sound bigger and stranger (the restless programming of “WhisperI’lllistentohearit,” the saxophone exhalation of “Us”) while remaining committed to their aesthetic of sharp separation. Midnight grooves meet sharp songwriting on yet another strong outing from one of the most consistently great bands around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck_OSqxzvPc

Britt Daniel has said that “Tear it Down” wasn’t written as a political song, but a tune about tearing down walls (made of “bricks and ill intentions”) couldn’t help but capture elements of the moment. But this organ-spiked head-nodder is more than just that, as it intertwines a doomsday scenario and alternate reality with a na-na-na bridge and Spoon’s typically sharp, percussive persistence. Britt Daniel has said that “Tear it Down” wasn’t written as a political song, but a tune about tearing down walls (made of “bricks and ill intentions”) couldn’t help but capture elements of the moment. But this organ-spiked head-nodder is more than just that, as it intertwines a doomsday scenario and alternate reality with a na-na-na bridge and Spoon’s typically sharp, percussive persistence.

Nine albums in, Spoon might have finally cracked the code. Hot Thoughts succeeds first and foremost as a disarmingly subtle way of taking a meaningful evolutionary step as a band. Even a quick listen reveals that the Austin vets have taken their sonic palette to its most adventurous conclusion. It’s not the first time they’ve been willing to bathe their sound in synthesizers or other electronic treatments (witness “New York Kiss,” or “Was It You”), but it’s the first time they’ve let some of the elegant sonic spaces truly overtake the record. In many ways Hot Thoughts feels like a tribute to David Bowie, who personified the elusive bridge between the conflicting pop, punk, art and party impulses that the Gen-Xers have always struggled to find. It is crisp, arch and flowing, proving Spoon to be among Bowie’s most astute heirs in spirit.

The critics have duly bestowed their substantial and yet lukewarm praise on the new release by Spoon”Hot Thoughts” . In truth, it’s Spoon’s best and most accomplished album in what has been a staggering run starting with “Telephono” in 1996. The only competition for their best LP is “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga”, but then “Transference” is also a terrific listen too. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, Hot Thoughts is not the “interesting” late-period effort of established band . But the fulfillment of promises made as far back as that first album.

In the past few years Britt Daniel has had the artistic integrity to push himself ever deeper into adventurous climes, and the result has been a series of riotously propulsive and intermittently messy masterpieces that nevertheless seldom feel anything less than contemporary and wrought. Together, Daniel has been defining the state of the art of rock music for a stretch now. For a songwriter known for his inability to write a bad song, it’s easy to forget that Britt Daniel was once pushed to the brink. And whether he wants to or not, on Hot Thoughts, his group is bridging back to the beginning.

When Spoon first appeared on the scene their obvious touchstone was UK band Wire. The man has evidently been inhaling Philip Glass and Brian Eno of late; in their spirit, every album sets standards that are unmistakably its own.

Spoon’s strongest period “obviously” starts with Girls Can Tell . That album and the next two merely laid an inoffensive foundation for the intrepid and great albums that begin with 2008’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. That run of releases has catapulted producer Jim Eno (who also drums) into a different category with not many contempories in the landscape producing albums with as much care and skill.

The Spoon albums of the last decade bear some similarities to the second half of Beck’s career, during which he has put out a lot of accomplished, resonant albums that never quite got their due, Every Spoon song sounds confident as fuck, and that’s the residue as well as the purpose of Jim Eno’s production. The background is constantly pulsating with gusts of chord.

It’s a fact that Hot Thoughts grows unkempt as it careens toward its beatific conclusion. lead single and album title track “Hot Thoughts,” which, ostensibly, is one of the most straightforwardly sexy songs that Daniel has ever written (“I tell it to you slow when I want ya to know,” he croons), but is in fact layered with more sinister undertones.

The album’s first two songs, “Hot Thoughts” and “WhisperI’lllistentohearit,” combine funk, atmosphere, and forward momentum as well as anything Spoon has done . The album’s hypnotic and endlessly interesting fulcrum, “Pink Up,” which carries the listener to the second needle drop, resembles a locale Yo La Tengo would’ve loved to stake out but could never quite find.