Review Summary: Transference is a blod step in a different direction for Spoon, but it narrowly misses the spot among the band's best records because it occasionally falters.
With Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Gax5 henceforth) Spoon got their big break, reaching an unforeseeable n.2 spot in the US Billboard charts with an album that was incredibly expansive and diverse in sound, without sacrificing depth for breadth. It was a rare beast, conjugating singles dressed for success and experimentations that were as left-field as anything they had done before (The Ghost Of You Lingers might be the boldest thing they have ever done). But it didn't come out of the blue, as with Gax5 Spoon had completed a winning streak of four amazing albums, so if Transference is at all considered akin to a "difficult second album" it's a matter beyond the music itself and Spoon shouldn't be influenced by that. They shouldn't. But they have. However, instead of trying to ride the wave, as most artists would do in this case, Spoon have crafted a record that is in many ways off-putting and seems almost aimed at wrongfooting those who jumped on the bandwagon as late as 2007. Perhaps I'm extrapolating too much, but Transference seems like the sound of a band who feared that their own commercial success would threaten their artistic integrity.
It didn't seem so at first, when the first couple singles were released: Got Nuffin and Written In Reverse were nice straightforward rockers that would sit well among the previous effort's more guitar-driven numbers: the rest of the album is a different story and it can get positively puzzling, in a turn of events that is somewhat the reverse of what happened with Gax5, where the über-accessible collection was anticipated by The Ghost Of you Lingers, which got many heads scratching.
When first interviewed about the album, Britt Daniel emphasized the fact that the record had been entirely self-produced and it was what he always wanted a Spoon record to sound like, and if you're a Spoon fan, that isn't necessarily a good thing, since a lot of the magic from previous albums (first and foremost, Kill The Moonlight) lay in ingenuous ways of using the studio as a tool, and at no point did it seem like the production was adulterating the "Spoon sound", which is somehow what Daniel was implying there - I would be hard-pressed to even imagine what the past Spoon records would be without the clever production.
The change is there, all right: throughout the album the sound is made sloppy in a way that one can only assume is deliberate, and the songs emerge threadbare in a way that's absolutely new to Spoon (if you exclude their works before Girls Can Tell, in a genre where low fidelity was endemic anyway). I can cite countless examples: in the end of Is Love Forever? the vocals are clumsily chopped and stuttered, while in Mystery Zone the instrumentals are exactly the same whether the vocals are there or not - which makes the vocals seem adlibbed (not to mention how it ends..), or in Who Makes Your Money? Britt's wordless vocals are run through a pitch-shifter at random. Whether you find this unorthodox production to be a success or not depends on how much you buy into the theory that it all fits into a sort of theme, hinted at by the title of the record (look it up), and that this is the first record that Spoon make that displays any form of fragility or emotion. Spoon famously named one of their records Kill The Moonlight after a slogan of the futurist movement, that had in their intentions to put an end to sappy romanticism in literature and celebrate machines and technology (which is a better review of the record than anything you'll find on the internet..) and Transference is a far, far cry from that. The lyrics are no less obtuse (at times even more) but they veer towards wistfulness and regret much, much more: the best example is Out Go The Lights, but the mood is there, nearly everywhere, and many songs occasionally offer fascinating glimpses into the songwriter's psyche -which so far had been a closed book - although sometimes they end up in the kind of sap they once avoided: case in point, the worst song Spoon have made in years, the flimsy ballad Goodnight Laura.
Spoon have always been ones for tight and perfectly balanced songs, but in this case freeing themselves of structural restrictions can often prove revelatory. My personal standout from the record, I Saw The Light, is faintly reminiscent of Don't Make Me A Target in chord progression but ends up being much more, with a rousing crescendo that sounds like it could go on forever until it stops abruptly and breaks into an instrumental section that is probably the only remotely Can-like thing Spoon have ever done (there's a reason why I'm making that analogy).
Unexpected left turns are everywhere in this record, and they always catch the listener unprepared . Britt Daniel also famously claimed (not proudly, but matter-of-factly) that there were no bridges in the record - and that much is true, but often it's because there's no verse-chorus, either. I mentioned I Saw The Light, but song structure is often thrown out of the window, or followed all too studiously, almost as if to highlight that particular song as an extemporaneous digression (Trouble Comes Running doesn't seem fully thought out, but it's still exhilarating).
Transference is a blod step in a different direction for Spoon, but it narrowly misses the spot among the band's best records because it occasionally falters: in the end, however, you'll feel that this was the only thing Spoon could do - get out of the perfect niche they carved for themselves and try new things.
