HeiBräu

At the sound of Jim Eno’s comfortable ambling floor tom, the worn-in, fried keys of “Before Destruction” greet me at the gate. Transference is waiting at the end of the jetway. I’ve already bought my tickets to go see them in a few months. The effort I exert to keep this review on an even keel should be palpable at this point.

Transference finds Spoon as riffy as ever, but the exposition of the whole record is a much slower affair. This probably sounds, to any person who’s listened to a Spoon record before, like a huge joke. “Of course it’s paced and indirect; it’s Spoon,” they can hear themselves intoning. Yet the straw-haired, Ray-Ban sporting frontman Britt Daniel has found, unbeknownst to the band’s fanbase, a modicum of poise yet deeper down. This is easy to mistake, at first, for a lack of serviceable hooks. Don’t doubt it though, he can sense fear. There’s a variety of rewarding tracks to explore: “I Saw The Light” is a chugging charmer, and “Trouble Comes Running” hearkens back to the raw, spirited aesthetic of Daniel’s youth. Acting as a sort of laconic intermission, “Goodnight Laura” is easily Daniel’s most tender tune penned yet: “You can fall asleep by being very still / and let your breath slow down / and when you think your thoughts be sure that they are sweet ones / don’t you know, love, you’re alright / you’re alright.”

Transference is Spoon’s first self-produced record, and it shows, but not in a gamy sense. For instance, they get away with stunts that would never fly in any self-respecting producer’s den: Daniel’s vocal in “Is Love Forever?” jaggedly cuts off mid-line as it approaches flashpoint, and immediately following, “Mystery Zone” takes it a step further by simply shutting the whole track off before it appears to have had a chance to wind down cleanly. These kinds of choices that would traditionally have been terse studio errors are stylistic expression in the vein of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” Not only that, but what fans (and us, too) took as a botched leak of “Mystery Zone” (this referring to the track’s abrupt and seemingly early ending) turns out to have been the track’s final form.

Spoon’s “Written In Reverse,” from Transference.

While “Who Makes Your Money?” reads at first like an extended jam on an unworthy riff, a mid-song breakdown with harmonized guitars freshly executes yet again on Spoon’s trademark slow-burn formula. The track also contains a charming series of howls from Daniel, like somebody scratching his back hit just the right spot, before giving way to “Written In Reverse,” the with-teeth refrain that enthusiasts have come to anticipate on any forthcoming Spoon record (“The Fitted Shirt;” “Jonathon Fisk;” “I Turn My Camera On;” “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case”).

Granted Spoon’s overwhelmingly impressive catalogue — Girls Can Tell, Kill The Moonlight, Gimme Fiction, and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga are all genre-defining listens, and Telephono and A Series of Sneaks are probably semi-enjoyable at very worst — the record’s immediate competition lies within the band’s own oeuvre, which stands pat as the some of the most consistent songwriting by an artist of any discipline. To wit, Transference is unlikely to be recognized straight away by even their fan base as one of their finest records. This should hardly register as a surprise; it’s entirely true that Transference doesn’t ring back in one’s ears so easily as the highlights from earlier records, but that’s ultimately what makes it noteworthy, when later, you are forcibly and happily stunned by its late-breaking grasp.

To some degree, the ears know what they like right off the bat. This record contains no poppy retreads of “The Underdog” or “The Way We Get By,” which in a way is disappointing, but it’s also a laudable evolution in the band’s history. To call it an ugly record wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but it’s only so ugly as a French Mastiff or a Pit Bull Terrier at the Westminster Kennel Club’s final circle: to one who fancies the art, it’s still a lean, competitive example of the post-punk breed.

And at the end of the day, Spoon are still reigning as the one no-holds barred rock band not slurring their approach with a bevy of easily-abused filters. The juxtaposition of that directness with their impeccable, savage economy of arrangements is what makes their sound so satisfying, yet fashionably gaunt. The implied meaning of this, hopefully, eschews the old esoteric jazz cliché: “It’s in the notes he’s not playing, man!” To put it better: sometime in the future, in a graveyard in Austin, Texas, a headstone should read, “Here Lies Britt Daniel, Master Of Restraint.”