Spoon’s new album is the worst album they have made in years. I give it an A-.
I used to think that all bands should be as a consistent as Spoon, but clearly, being a consistently great band causes problems. If you make Girls Can Tell, then you make Kill the Moonlight, then you make Gimme Fiction, then you make Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, you end up in a strange position: you can put out a very good album that is somehow still disappointing.
The same thing happened to Radiohead. These days, some people will tell you that Hail to the Thief is a let down, even though no one was saying that at the time it was released.
The Unavoidably Disappointing Follow-up Album Conundrum (henceforth referred to as the UDFAC) works as an interesting argument against the album format in general. In the era of instant-access technology, a band that opts to let recordings trickle out onto their websites steadily rather than save the tracks for an album release effectively dismantles the anticipation cycle that contributes to the UDFAC. This idea works in theory; however, Radiohead recently released a single-serving tune through their website (“These Are My Twisted Words”), and the experience was as underwhelming as a gang of Pablo Honey’s at a Hail to the Thief convention debating whether or not “Pop is Dead.”
This subject is too big for one entry. I’ll get back to this later.
-Warren
