2010 Tunes: Transfer Pending

Spoon - Transference

Transference has a couple different meanings. A quick internet search reveals that it means, uh, “the process of being transferred” (thanks, dictionary.com!), but also that it’s a psychoanalytic term for taking your feelings for a certain thing and tying them to a new (and often unrelated) thing. Like if you spend your life scared of clowns because one murdered your parents, transference occurs when you begin to fear your roommate because you catch the dude trying on face paint.

So if someone (let’s say a band named “Spoon”) decides to name their new album Transference, is it because they think it illustrates this curious and not-exactly-desirable process? Or causes it? Or is it because Britt Daniel “just thought the word was really pretty”?

Well, shit.

Spoon is one of those bands whose popularity only grows faster the harder they try to dodge labels and meanings. But that hasn’t stopped critics from trying, and with every new album come a flurry of descriptors ever harder and faster and wronger. (Yes, “wronger”. That’s how wrong.)

I have a theory on this and it’s completely self-serving, but oh well: I think their best album is Gimme Fiction. That album found a great balance between the band’s fun-loving and cerebral tendencies, really unequaled before or since. And this was the album when Spoon really started to blow up, but nobody called it at first. Critics thought the album was pretty good, fans wanted more “Stay Don’t Go”, etc. And suddenly: commercials. Bigger shows. Stephen King calls “I Summon You” his song of the year. Near-stupid levels of popularity. And then everyone realizes: oh shit. This album was actually really good.

Fast-forward two years: Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga drops and critics fall all over each other trying to be The First to declare this album An Instant Classic. But, really? It’s just another good Spoon album, with the requisite broad hits (“The Underdog”), textural experiments (“The Ghost of You Lingers”) and late-album filler (“My Little Japanese Cigarette Case”) intact. It opened the floodgates to bigger concert venues and a critical jizz-fest, sure, but suggesting that this is their best album is basically a slap in the face to Fiction, Kill the Moonlight and Girls Can Tell.

And here we are again in 2010 with Transference, which finds our boys keepin’ on keepin’ on, and the Quest For New Superlatives is back in full force. These guys are “brilliant innovators”, “scientists of the studio”, “uncompromising visionaries”, etc. And, guys, I know we have to flex our vocabulary muscles and all that, but let’s take a step back for a minute.

One of the few negative – if funny and a little unfair – criticisms of the album I’ve heard is that it’s “a perfectly good collection of b-sides”. I can see where this comes from: a lot of the album is sparse, and some tracks sound like they could be demos – because, actually, some of the tracks are the demo versions, which the band reverted to after tossing out slicker versions. Using demos on your proper album is a ballsy move – so credit for taking the risk, at least – but there’s a reason for this: it’s because demos typically sound pretty janky. And these demos are no different; they don’t get a pass just because they come from Spoon. I love the exaltation that songs like “Trouble” contain “the gritty promise of demos”, as if they’re exciting because they point to the possibility that they might one day become better or, at least, more. But, guys, this is the album! If there’s any “more” it’ll be a Neon Indian remix or an alternate take on disc 2 of the tenth anniversary re-release!

Which raises the question: is a demo still a demo if it ends up on the album? Is a b-side still a b-side if it’s “Yellow Ledbetter”? This album’s layers and juxtapositions might bring about a lot of beard-scratching discussion and postulation, which is fine, but it seems to come at the expense of a lot of fun. It’s a shame, because there is fun to be had here, like in the mish-mash enthusiasm of “Nobody Gets Me But You” and the groovy outro of “I Saw the Light” that grows into its whole own Thing. But there are also attempts at levity - like that “Whoo!” tacked into the coda of “Written in Reverse” whose enthusiasm I just don’t buy.

But this might be unfair. Spoon are allowed to go in different directions (isn’t that what we should want from our favorite bands?), and it’s ridiculous to get upset when they don’t just record Kill the Moonlight Pt 2. But it’s hard to ignore the first thing that makes Transference stand out: its jarring transitions. Second track “Is Love Forever?” bottoms out under its own strain barely two minutes in; “Mystery Zone” sounds so good on the radio until it cuts out, mid-word, rather than hitting what would assumedly have been a peak of ascending notes and sharper strings. How many are really happy to be dropped from these heights straight into the muted, wobbly tones of “Who Makes Your Money”? Probably not a lot. Look, these guys are trying to tell us something with this. This is not the sound of them fucking up; it the sound of them trying to teach.

OK, but what? On further listens you realize there’s actually a lot of stopping and starting on “Mystery Zone”, musically and lyrically. At times Daniel seems to be having trouble forming coherent thoughts. Later, “Out Go the Lights” sends him in a couple narrative directions without settling on a single one. Gradually, it becomes clearer that if these guys are trying to say something, it’s that they don’t know what to say. A quick googling of Transference criticism comes up with telling adjectives: “discombobulated”; “fumbling”; “transitory”. If I wanted to be a total dick, I’d ask: if you don’t know what you’re trying to say, why are you saying anything? (The fact that I didn’t delete this question after typing it out, though, means I’m at least half a dick. Maybe three-quarters.) If this is them being off-the-cuff and uninhibited, why does this all feel like such a carefully crafted experiment?

But, again, I have to back off, because this is assuming a lot. Playing a set for KCRW a few weeks back, they were asked why they included some of the controversial cuts and halts on the album, to which they responded [something to the effect of] “We just felt like it”. The whole interview was a little awkward – the band seemed less interested in explaining their music than just playing it – and it could have been an easy dodge, but you know, why not give these seven-album-deep indie pros the benefit of the doubt?

For me, it’s mostly that there’s a lot to love on Transference, but the roughest parts of the album really subtract from the whole (that smash-cut ending to “Is Love Forever”? It’s just sloppy, with the vocal echoes cut a fraction of a second after the rest of the song), and the closest possibility to a method behind the madness – that the band is just, you know, saying whatever – isn’t nearly a compelling enough reason to appreciate that. It’s not really that postmodern or daring; it just seems half-baked. It’s a shame, because that effort to teach sullies a lot of what could have been another classic from these guys - if that’s what they even wanted in the first place.