Gimme Fiction is Spoon's loosest, most eclectic effort yet. While still sounding like themselves, the Austin-based band manages to evoke a number of other artists on their fifth full-length. (It's a neat trick.) On proto-glam opener "The Beast and Dragon, Adored," Britt Daniels channels the David Bowie of The Man Who Sold the World. Then there's slinky jam "I Turn My Camera On," where he conjures up Prince or Mick Jagger, circa "Miss You," by singing in a higher register. As indicated by the title, "Sister Jack" sounds like early Who (i.e. "Happy Jack"), while "They Never Got You" sounds like Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon. Do all these different styles hang together? For the most part: yes. After the triumph of Kill the Moonlight, Spoon could have easily rested on their laurels and issued another album just like it, but Gimme Fiction proves they would rather evolve than stagnate. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Spoon
Gimme Fiction
[Merge; 2005]
Rating: 7.9
For more than five years and three albums, Spoon have occupied the weird purgatory between being one of the largest names in indie rock and barely-there mainstream recognition-- big enough to see print in Time (for Kill the Moonlight), but not big enough for that magazine's 30-and-up demographic to care. From their earliest flirtations with Elektra, Spoon were a dark horse in an industry that values the easily, tritely categorized; every album was a shift in sound, subtly tweaking prior formulas, distilling an already minimal sound into something even more distant. So far the refinement is evident, and they've followed success with even more success because, ratios aside, Spoon's intrinsic elements have never changed. Head-first, maximum R'n'B and tense, shuffling rhythms back Britt Daniel's unparalleled vocals and despite constant re-invention, Spoon remain, inimitably, Spoon.
Understandably then, Gimme Fiction succeeds for the same reasons, but that doesn't mean it's a step forward. Instead, Spoon return to more familiar territory-- some of which they haven't glimpsed since Soft Effects EP-- by pushing guitars back to the front occasionally, kicking out big 4/4 anthems, and leaning on some heavy rock piano to create a brooding, anxious album that's superficially more straightforward than anything they've done in years. For better or worse, Kill the Moonlight is a tough act to follow; after pushing their sound to its stripped-down limit, anything less than a further push into the frontier sounds like compromise, but, as Daniel howls on "The Beast and Dragon, Adored", "If you believe, they call it rock and roll". It all depends on your perspective.
Gimme Fiction is actually a wildly diverse album, almost schizophrenic in its composition, vacillating between acoustic ballads, a bubbly, synth-tinged number ("They Never Got You"), handclaps, strings, and a whole lot of blue-eyed soul. It feels like rock action only because the album's finest moments-- for the most part-- are in the sublime climaxes of guitar-driven tunes, notably the heart-swelling, tambourine-ringing relief of "Sister Jack" or the beautifully spare "I Summon You". But calling them "rock songs" feels like an oversimplification: The term implies a simplicity that just isn't present even in the most direct offerings on Gimme Fiction.
"The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentin" illustrates an attention to the deeper, nuanced elements-- piano and cello flourishes run alongside the guitar chords and carry it to a stunning crescendo; the sheer volume of different noises at work underneath the melodies is enormous, and not one of them is out of place. The boys in Spoon have come a long way since the surefire blast of "Car Radio" (or even "Jonathon Fisk", for that matter), and even the most direct songs here have a precision craftsmanship rarely heard in something that is still, at heart, a rock album.
A rock album-- except for a single song that rejects that assertion completely, and is one of the most breathtaking songs Spoon has ever produced. "I Turn My Camera On" is a Prince-tastic masterpiece hearkening back to the Stones' "Emotional Rescue", but with a show-stopping grandeur that beats them both at their own game-- for one song, anyway; when it comes to soul, Britt Daniel has more in his larynx than Mick Jagger now has in his cold, lifeless body and the call-and-response between his backing chant and his own unbelievable, dual-layered falsetto proves it in barely three-and-a-half minutes. Spoon continue to refine and redefine their product, but rarely is the distinction between one adventurous standout and the rest of an album so marked. A smart band could build a career on the sound just tossed away in "I Turn My Camera On"; in this case, I'd have settled for just one more song, but even if the alternative is business-as-usual for Spoon, that's still pretty great.
-Eric Carr, May 10, 2005
Review by Heather Phares
The three-year stretch between Gimme Fiction and Spoon's previous album, Kill the Moonlight, was the longest gap between the band's releases since the end of its disastrous relationship with Elektra Records helped put two and a half years between A Series of Sneaks and Girls Can Tell. Though the circumstances behind this hiatus probably weren't as dire as those behind the band's previous one, the anticipation surrounding Gimme Fiction was nearly as high as it was for Girls Can Tell, and Gimme Fiction feels like as much of a refinement on what came before it as Girls Can Tell did at the time. A dark, theatrical album seething with late-night tension and menace, Gimme Fiction is a bigger-sounding affair than Spoon's previous work, with lots of keyboards, guitars, and strings parts courtesy of the Tosca Strings. But, even with the album's bigger scope, the band keeps its eye for detail. Everything about Gimme Fiction, from its artwork -- which looks like photographer Irving Penn doing a surreal fashion spread on Little Red Riding Hood for Vogue Magazine circa the 1950s -- to the little sound effects that embellish each song, is meticulous. Fortunately, "meticulous" doesn't spill over into "careful" or "precious"; the album's first three tracks show that Spoon makes music that's intricate and rousing at the same time. "The Beast and Dragon, Adored" acts as a slow-building preface and statement of intent, mentioning later song titles and introducing Gimme Fiction's big, brooding sound. "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine," a string-driven tale of a mysterious gentleman/cad, boasts some of Britt Daniel's cleverest storytelling, while "I Turn My Camera On" turns voyeurism and emotional distance into a subtly irresistible groove that sounds like a tense rewrite of the Stones' "Emotional Rescue" (later on, the intro of "They Never Got You" sounds strangely like Hall & Oates' "Maneater" -- it's nice to hear them reach back to '70s and '80s references that aren't the post-punk and new wave influences borrowed by so many other indie rock bands, or even the Elvis Costello nods that shaped so much of Spoon's earlier work). Gimme Fiction's opening trio of songs is so strong that it tends to overpower the rest of the album at first, but other standouts eventually bubble to the surface: "My Mathematical Mind" is one long verse, broken up by instrumental interludes where choruses would normally go; it keeps building and building, and though it's not an immediate song, it is a hypnotic one. On the other hand, the relatively lighthearted "Sister Jack" and pretty but oddly jittery acoustic ballad "I Summon You" just emphasize how moody and nocturnal the rest of the album is. Indeed, taut, restrained tracks like "The Delicate Place," "The Infinite Pet," and "Merchants of Soul" seem to be more about supporting Gimme Fiction's nocturnal mood than standing out as great songs. Still the interesting productions and arrangements on songs like these and "Was It You?" make them enjoyable in their own right. "Meticulous," "distant," and "restrained" may not be the most likely adjectives to describe a good rock record, but they fit Gimme Fiction perfectly. With this album, Spoon continues to build one of the most consistent, and distinctive, bodies of work in indie rock -- the band makes changes and takes chances from album to album, but ends up sounding exactly how Spoon should sound each time.
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