Girls Can Tell by Spoon
I started listening to Spoon in 2007, following the release of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Despite three years of exposure, I never really got into them. After a healthy dose of Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, I was simply tired of everything I'd ever heard before. As 2007 drew to a close, I stopped listening to music altogether (and two computer crashes did not help at all). By the time I started listening to music again in 2009, I had already forgotten all about Spoon. It wasn't until I decided to listen to Spoon again late in the night (in order to get them off my list) did I begin to fall in love with Spoon again.
Aside from nodding your head along to the song (or singing, if you are daring), smiling, or grabbing your friends by their shirt collar and saying "Listen to this!", there's something incommunicable about Spoon's music. I could say they sound clean, I could say they sound simultaneously angry and refined, but it would fall short of what Girls Can Tell really sounds like. I could attribute the aggression in the album from their being dumped by their major label, but that would be shortchanging the emotional artistry in the album.
Rather than analyze lyrics song by song, I will briefly mention some of my favorite tracks. Few albums open as tensely as "Everything Hits at Once", and "Believing is Art" is a lovely follow up to this track. "Me and the Bean" is one of my favorites, particularly for the lines "Do you remember when you were small/How everybody would seemed so tall/I am your shadow in the dark/I have your blood inside my heart". "Fitted Shirt" is enjoyable simply because how many bands will dedicate an entire song to spelling out the grievances of one-size-fits-all shirts? The entire album is so full of hooks that it's hard to pick just a single favorite.
I feel like I've done a pretty bad job on this one, but considering I'm very out of practice, I'll stop here and call it good. At least I didn't redirect you to Pitchfork, right?
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