Review Summary: Just another spoonful
Spoon’s new EP
Memory Dust shares artwork colors with last year’s excellent LP
Lucifer On The Sofa, an immediate signal that this is one of the those little releases which often follow in the wake of album cycles, featuring various tracks which didn’t quite make the cut. And sure enough, the slight tracklist here consists of two tunes which narrowly missed inclusion on the 2022 record, plus a cover. All three songs are good, but approximately 66.7% of the tracklist is fairly unremarkable - “Sugar Babies” maintains a nice bouncy feeling and features an extended trippy outro, but seems like a textbook case of a band admirably doing something different without revelatory results, while a rendition of Bo Diddley’s “She’s Fine, She’s Mine” adds a decent touch of old-timey blues to the proceedings. It’s closer “Silver Girl” which makes this EP, though. Here, Britt Daniel sounds impressively like Tom Petty, and it works, bringing a heartland Americana vibe to a song which more clearly resides in the realm of sensuous, airy, pop-adjacent indie rock. Riding a catchy melody and all-around tight presentation, it’s one of latter-day Spoon’s best tunes. All told,
Memory Dust might be largely just “pretty solid”, but this is one of those short EPs in which a single song alone makes it worth the price of admission.
