At the dawn of the century, Austin, TX replaced Seattle and Chapel Hill as the national indie rock headquarters for hipsters, slackers and ne’er-do-wells, and Spoon was the city’s king. Frontman Britt Daniel can swagger and sneer just as well as Mick Jagger, and his co-conspirators form one of the tightest, hardest working bands out there. Unfortunately, after a long run of increasingly promising, consistently great rock albums, Spoon has suddenly released its weakest to date with Gimme Fiction.
There has always been progress in Spoon’s sound, until now. Since its debut, the band has shifted from shallow, if rocking, Pavement and Pixies imitations towards electronic experimentation and staccatto, tightly arranged jabs of guitar or keyboards. Taken alone, Gimme Fiction isn’t an objectively bad album; it’s just a holding pattern. The boys from Austin may have simply set the bar too high for themselves, but none of the songs here are as compelling or listenable as their predecessors. The theme of fiction and storytelling runs throughout the album, but the instrumentation is too boring to make the listener want to keep up with the occasionally interesting lyrics.
Most of the songs halfheartedly rehash the laid back, slightly menacing piano-based groove of Moonlight’s “The Way We Get By” or Girls Can Tell’s stately, spare syncopation. Lead track “The Beast and Dragon, Adored” is the only one that feels worthwhile. The two exceptions “I Turn My Camera On” and “Was It You?” swerve into disco and dance-punk, mercifully hip-shaking their way out of the album’s turgid narratives. The band has the chops to seriously shake up some of these numbers live, but on the album they come off sounding flat.
Spoon broke out of the faceless mass of ‘90s indie guitar rock by pushing the rhythm to the front. Sure, the melodies are great, but the songs have always moved, too. Gimme Fiction is the sound of the band’s drive chain slipping off the gears.
