Album Review: Transference

Spoon’s Transference is their seventh studio album and their first true release under mainstream scrutiny. It’s never easy following up the best performance in a show. Their previous work, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was a massive critical and commercial success, not to mention brilliantly composed. They’ve established a reputation for high quality musical output, but the ride to indie stardom was certainly a bumpy one.

Spoon "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" from Ryan Junell on Vimeo.

Spoon was formed in 1993 by lead singer/guitarist Britt Daniel and drummer Jim Eno in Austin, Texas. Their 1996 debut, Telephono, drew comparisons to Sonic Youth and the Pixies in its punk rock and indie influenced sound. Yet, the band quickly grew into a genre of their own, signing to Elektra Records and releasing A Series of Sneaks, their major-label debut. Following disappointing sales, Spoon was dropped from the label and moved underground, releasing EPs and singles for several years. Since signing with North Carolina indie label Merge Records in 2001, the band has released four critically acclaimed albums, each outselling the last, culminating in 2007's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga debuting at #10 on the Billboard charts. Facing a burgeoning fan base and thrust in the spotlight, Spoon took several years and tempered expectations before releasing Transference.

It should be acknowledged that this album has several enjoyable offerings. There are a few moments that stand out among the forty-three minutes of wandering explorations of mood and texture and soundscape. “I Saw The Light” starts out as melancholy, shuffling rock, before abruptly taking a u-turn at the halfway mark into a taut, percussive dialogue between piano and guitar. Other highlights include the lead single “Got Nuffin,” a tambourine-tapping, drum-and-bass track in the vein of Beck or Radiohead, and “Is Love Forever?” one of the album’s many romantic lyrical endeavors, fraught with Eno’s bubbly drumming and Daniel’s choppy guitar rhythms.

Yet, for a three-year wait, Transference is disappointingly bland. The all-important catchy hooks and sing-along choruses are conspicuously absent. The result is a stripped-down and meandering effort that resembles a bundle of hastily recorded studio jams. Spoon has always had that x-factor that makes their music extraordinarily easy to listen to, but as much as Transference should be the culmination of a rapid rise to the top through songwriting maturity and creativity, it falls flat in excitement and fails to break new musical ground. Perhaps it was the high expectations, perhaps the band wanted to eschew the poppiness of Ga, but Transference is a musical lapse of an album with a majority of filler and a minority of quality.