Audio By Carbonatix
Spoon has always been the best approximation of a Motown indie glam outfit, with songs sprung on hand claps and hooks tucked into every piano riff and acoustic strum. Coupled with the warm nasal scuff of Britt Daniel’s groove-riding turns of phrase, Spoon dishes out literate white-boy soul wrapped in ass-shaking commandments. Gimme Fiction finds the boys playfully risking excess in dramatic flourishes, like the funk in the trunk falsetto on cuts such as “I Turn My Camera On,” or the sighing violins and cafe-poet lyrical knots on tracks such as “The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine.” The group’s string of records has long put it on the brink of much greater acclaim, but while Fiction is the band’s best record artistically, it’s far less soundtrack-ready than its last disc, Kill the Moonlight, and still may not ripple beyond the faithful fold.
