Spoon - Hot Thoughts

The Guardian 100

(Matador)

Spoon have released nine albums since the early 1990s, the last three reaching the US Top 10. So they have nothing to prove, but you wouldn’t know that from the 10 songs here: Hot Thoughts is loaded with tunes, invention and adventure. Take the title track. Its arrangement never sits still – elements of post-punk jerkiness and dub appear and then are gone – but at its core is a descending-chord motif that is pure simplicity. Do I Have to Talk You Into It is a great rock song, but Spoon weave in electronica, disco and garage rock to lift it into another league. Britt Daniel’s searing voice has an elemental rock’n’roll feel, like John Lennon’s or Kurt Cobain’s, and the whole album is expertly conceived and put together. Halfway through, it takes a sharp left turn with Pink Up, on which vibraphone and maracas coax us into a backwards-vocal-and-strings dreamscape. Finally, haunting closer Us leaves us alone with saxophones, the band only kicking in at the fade-out.

Related: Spoon frontman Britt Daniel: ‘I wanted to be a musician, not a rockstar’

Drowned In Sound 80

No, the big shock here is that the band’s ninth record, Hot Thoughts, is the biggest re-invention of their career. Over nearly 25 years they’ve always tinkered with the mould rather than breaking it, experimenting liberally but still keeping the ship steady.

However, Hot Thoughts sees Spoon shift their focus more drastically than ever. Electronics play a far bigger role this time around, aided no doubt by Dave Fridmann’s synthetic wizardry. Jim Eno’s unbeatable rhythms are much more lively too, less for rock n’ roll swaggering and more for dainty hip wiggling. Where the enigmatic Britt Daniel once dealt mainly in unknowns and abstracts, he now oozes a syrupy, seductive, leather-jacketed confidence. In short: Hot Thoughts is Spoon’s take on a dance record.

After the razor-sharp lead single ‘Hot Thoughts’, the first time this is truly obvious is on ‘Whisperi’lllistentohearit’, which, after an enveloping passage of disembodied vocals and synths, abruptly flips a switch and turns into a hurtling, New Order-inspired new-wave anthem. A Spoon song rarely transforms that drastically and that quickly, and it’s immediately clear that Hot Thoughts is going to be full of surprises.

Sure enough, they come thick and fast – ‘Do I Have To Talk You Into It’, a throbbing, jagged piece of electronic rock, blasts that Gimme Fiction era strut into 2017, whilst the earwormy ‘Can I Sit Next To You’ plays like a frisky cousin of ‘I Turn My Camera On’. The serious new-wave influences, particularly the chugging bass line of ‘Shotgun’, are some of the most tangible touchstones Spoon have ever displayed. Their output up to now was decidedly hard to categorise - not so here.

Elsewhere the band indulge some of their edgier tendencies. ‘Pink Up’ sounds like a lost Bonobo cut, recalling the strange atmosphere of ‘The Ghost of You Lingers’, and a rare vocal-less track ‘Us’ is almost entirely ambient, giving space to some gorgeous, velvety saxophone in the album’s final moments.

The downside of Spoon’s gamble on Hot Thoughts is that it won’t please everyone. For the rock purists reeled in early by 'Girls Can Tell' and 'Kill the Moonlight', a few moments may have too much groove and grandeur for comfort. The pumping four-to-the-floor of ‘First Caress’ is likely the biggest culprit, handing you a dose of 24-carat dance-pop that won’t be to everyone’s tastes. The sincerity of ‘I Ain’t The One’ - a minimal, keyboard-led ballad - could be spoilt by it’s youthful, metronomic beat, if that’s not your bag.

Even if the sound isn’t for you though, the existence of Hot Thoughts is a positive. Rarely does a band this far into its career, with such an established and celebrated sound, pull off a risk as well as this. The familiar intelligence of Daniel’s songwriting remains intact, and the band around him sound completely revitalised by the new approach. Whilst Hot Thoughts may divide fans, it stands as proof that class is permanent. Spoon are still one of the most forward-thinking rock bands around, and we’re still very lucky to have them 25 years later.

Pitchfork 74

Despite remaining perennial indie rock favorites over the last decade, Spoon have always been about that small-stakes life. They aren’t going to alter the course of your existence—frontman Britt Daniel would probably smirk at such a claim—but occasionally Daniel’s hyper-specific details will creep into your mind unexpectedly. Is Dorian’s a real place? What’s the corner by Sound Exchange in Austin look like anyway? And why don’t more people talk about how much Garden State actually sucked?

This is not to say that Spoon’s songs don’t often overflow with sound, as they increasingly have. But there is no tortured myth surrounding the whole ordeal, no idealistic aims to be anything more than career band making themselves happy. Every few years, they put out a record that sounds like Spoon but offers some new little twist, they tour for long stretches after that, and then they go away for a while. Their last album, 2014’s They Want My Soul, was one of their best—soulful and swirling, with just enough teeth showing between the hooks. Their ninth album, Hot Thoughts, picks up that thread and takes it in a funkier and freer direction. There are loads of drum beats that sound indebted to hip-hop and dance music throughout, downbeat electronics, and two five-minute instrumentals, including a moody jazz coda that closes the record.

But Spoon also know their lane quite well: punchy, inconspicuously catchy songs, with choruses just vague enough to make them applicable outside of whatever stylized vignette Daniel has yelped out; bonus points if there’s a brief jam session that runs intoxicatingly off the rails for just a moment towards the song’s end. This dichotomy can make Hot Thoughts a little uneven, unsure if it’s trying to be arty or poppy while playing around with the drum machines.

There are the hit attempts: The repetitive title track, whose jittery energy is practically killed by its surface-level “hot thoughts” about a sexy girl, nary a hint of clever winking to be found. And there are the clear hits: “Can I Sit Next to You,” which proves they’re almost as adept as Phoenix at infectiously anxious dance-rock, and “Do I Have to Talk You Into It,” an instant classic that could only come from this band. Jim Eno’s swaggering drums—a key element of Spoon’s sound since the start—and Alex Fischel’s descending piano chords drive the song boundlessly forward, punctuated by Daniel’s selective rasp. It takes a certain kind of 45-year-old frontman to sing the phrase “knock knock” and still sound at least moderately cool, not like some phony in his first pair of Ray-Bans.

Eno and Fischel also shine on “First Caress,” a toe-tapping tune about one of those ghosts that linger in Daniel’s head. He shoehorns in one of his Britticisms, a dry parenthetical that somehow captures the whole life of a character: “Coconut milk, coconut water/You still like to tell me they’re the same/And who am I to say?” On “Pink Up” he mumbles about taking a train to Marrakesh while the production—via indie-psych go-to Dave Fridmann—grows hazy and primal. By the end, the looping piano line, eerie strings, and bleeps of gibberish leave Spoon sounding a little like Radiohead. If anything, “Pink Up” tees up the final track, “Us,” which returns to the same motif after dark via saxophone and bells.

All this is a far cry from the band who wrote clever little classic-rock paeans to their fathers’ fitted shirts, but even then they were throwing in touches of harpsichord. That’s the trick with Spoon: They make it seem more straightforward than it actually is. Over time, their slowly accumulated sonic excess has led them here, to what could be considered their electronic album. But they’re caught just slightly between who they used to be and where they’re going, and the songs don’t always find a musical common ground. There’s one point in particular where their maximalism serves their attempt at an anthem—“Tear It Down”—but what’s funny is that the song’s sweeping whoa-oh climax is reminiscent of Arcade Fire, not Spoon. The tinkering of the trim Spoon attitude has become the most engaging part of their latter-day career. For a band that seems built on a reliable formula, they remain full of possibilities.