Album of the Week: Spoon- Girls Can Tell

Sometimes, getting fired or quitting a job can be the best thing that ever happens to you. It makes you reconsider what you really want out of life, and what things are really important to you. Assuming you are a creative person of some type, it also helps underscore your motivation for doing what you do: regardless of your finances, would you still be doing the same thing?? Even if you never get anywhere with what you're doing, would you still create in the same way, with the same intentions, or would the starving artist life eventually begin to inform your brush strokes, sentences, and guitar riffs??

After signing with Elektra, releasing an album (1998's A Series of Sneaks), and subsequently being dropped for not selling enough copies, Spoon had every reason to be angry and wonder about those motivations I posed above. The result of all this was neither a sellout, recorded-to-appeal album nor a middle finger, bitter diatribe against record companies and mainstream music listeners. No, after exercising their bile on a single called 'The Agony of Laffitte', the band eventually signed to indie powerhouse Merge Records and released Girls Can Tell, a spot-on indie rock/pop classic.

Spoon are one of those bands that, every time they release an album, reviewers are sure to say that it's either "their best album yet" or "a return to form" assuming they didn't like the last one. The truth, though, is that Spoon don't get better with age. Rather, they stay good with age. None of their albums are anything less than above-average and are all the more impressive for the way the band has maintained a distinctive sound while allowing each album to have its own character and feel. This is a paradox that many bands fail to solve: how do you change while also staying the same??

Girls Can Tell is an album bursting with ideas, melodies, and rhythms. The album opens with 'Everything Hits At Once', a song that I heard on a performance they did on Austin City Limits and which immediately caused me to track down the album. Once the song gets to the chorus and the piano/guitar riff hits, you're immediately hooked. Returning to the song again, you begin to notice Britt Daniel's impressionistic, snapshots-of-moments-and-feelings lyrics, the way the drums are mixed fairly up front and propel the song, and the meticulous production. 'Lines In The Suit' has chunky, nearly-reggae/funk-esque rhythm guitar, giving the song an up-and-down ride feel, later giving way to a falsetto-enhanced section. '10:20 AM' is built upon hazy organ chords and stringent acoustic guitar plucking, while the cinematic ending song 'Chicago At Night' moves with a circular, unstoppable carousel ride feel while slide guitars and subtle keyboards top everything off.

The one idea I never see brought up in Spoon reviews is their incredible sense of rhythm. I don't mean rhythm as in a funk or dance music context. I mean rhythm as it applies in a rock context, to drums, rhythm guitar, bass, and keyboards. Often the main melody of a Spoon song is just as much rhythmic as it is pure chord progressions or notes. 'Anything You Want' is a great example of this, as is 'Take The Fifth', songs in which the keyboards and drums, respectively, provide the main movement of a song while allowing the other instruments--including the vocals--to weave in and out of them, providing counterpoints, reinforcing that movement, or making sub-movements and melodies of its own. It may not be complex poly-rhythms, but it certainly shows a greater care toward rhythm than most indie rock--or rock bands in general--tend to show.

Though it was with their albums following Girls Can Tell that Spoon became popular and (more) critically acclaimed, everyone should go back to Girls Can Tell, both because it's a great album and because it's a lesson to artists never to give up or to let failure affect them.