Gavin B.

Sorry it took song long to get back to you. I've been travelling and took a long vacation from my home computer.

To answer your question about Transference: I don't like the album nearly as much as some of their earlier ones. Spoon set an impossibly high standard for themsevles with their previous album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. If Tranference was released in 2008 a year after the release of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, I would have been less disappointed. However Transference was three years in the making.

Most of the songs on Transference sound like demos with the low tech sound of a 4 track recording. This is the first album fully produced by the band so I should have expected some changes. Spoon has enjoyed critical and commerical success for a decade and many bands wage a rebellion against their own commerical success as part of their maturation process.

Many successful bands who came through the indie music ranks are never able resolve the enevitable conflict between the yin (artistic integrity) and the yang (commericial success). Most indie bands want to succeed on their own quirky idealistic terms and Nirvana is the worst case scenario of what happens when a band can't live with the existential contradiction between art and commerece. Spoon seems to be handling the issue in a far less destructive manner than Nirvana did. Bob Dylan rebelled against his own success by spending nearly three decades dliberately making god awful albums but we still loved him. Let's hope Spoon doesn't have the iron willed resolve of Dylan.

Perhaps I should reserve judgement on the new low tech, no frills approach of Spoon. When Girls Can Tell was released in 2001, it took me to fully appreciate it because the pop music sheen of the album was in complete conflict with what I usually listened to. Now 9 years later, I'm criticizing Transference for not having enough of a pop music sheen. Perhaps the problem is me.