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Spoon
"I'm going to use that in my next interview," claims Spoon's multi-instrumentalist impresario Eric Harvey, declaring that 'rhythmic propulsion' is the phrase that best sums up the sound of the band's most recent and seventh album, Transference.
"I like that - 'yeah man, it's all about the rhythmic propulsion'," he declares, totally deadpan. "I think that it's good that a band like Spoon can put out an album that surprises people and doesn't try to regurgitate what's popular from the previous record."
Response to the band's most recent album has been mixed - where some have hailed it as the best Spoon album of all time and a return to their best style, others have been surprised by the abandonment of the melodies abundant upon Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Part of that response is, perhaps, because that aforementioned previous album was the band's most directly pop-focussed, and certainly the group's most successful release to date in terms of sales impact.
"It feels like," Harvey begins, then wavers. "I don't know," he continues with a perceptible shrug. "People seem to think this album is harkening back to an older Spoon sound and for me I don't hear that. To me it sounds pretty unlike anything I've heard from Spoon before - I don't think it sounds like Kill the Moonlight, and it certainly doesn't sound like the last record. It seems like some of the response and the reviews have been less than favourable and some of them have been really glowing, so it seems that it really doesn't matter; there's really no consensus about this record."
One of the best things about the band has been their slow build - they debuted upon Matador with Telephono way back in 1996, before joining the ranks of the post-Nirvana altern-boom major label signings, being snapped up by Elekta, who promptly dropped them within the echo of A Series of Sneak being heard for the first time. Since then the band have been part of the venerated Merge label. As musicians they've never slowed down or stopped trying to up their game; principal songwriter and frontman Britt Daniel is the sort of artist who simply can't sit still.
"Britt is used to working in a lot of different modes," explains Harvey, "and he doesn't limit himself to one style. As his band we're used to doing whatever it takes to flesh that out; we can play really heavily melodic stuff, we can do really pretty quiet things or really noisy, chaotic things. We're not limited to any sonic palette.
"We bit off little chunks at a time," he says of the recording approach for the album. "We'd go out on short tours, do some regional tours, and try out new songs and then right at the end of that tour we'd go into the studio and we'd record two or three songs. We knew that we'd be in the studio for a week and try and get as much done as possible."
Bringing a song to completion is always a challenge, but never more so than on Transference, where Spoon for the very first time embraced the modern age, recording (almost) entirely on ProTools. It allowed the band to never have the need to record over anything, as they would if they were working on analogue tape, but instead stockpile every idea that they could think of in the lead-up to finalising the tracks heard on Transference.
"It lets you work on a totally different way," he says of the experience. "You don't have to commit to things as quickly. You can go back and listen to every single thing you did and pick and choose and cut and paste. You can put things together in ways you really can't do on tape. Working on tape has a different sound, and just the fact that you have to make those decisions I think lends itself to more of an immediacy - there's a statement in working with a destructive recording."
Without working on ProTools to create Transference, Harvey doesn't believe that the album would end up as it did.
"Some of the way that the sounds are edited wouldn't been very difficult to do on tape, if they were possible at all," he believes. "I don't think it's really changed the sound because the technology is so good these days that the sounds you may have associated with analogue are all still there. It just lets us add a whole new level that can exist in a more ephemeral space."
Spoon's Transference is out now, with the band hitting Fowlers Live on Thursday 13 May.
Andrew Weaver
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