Oh, distance has no way of making love understandable

Spoon - Gimme Fiction, Grade: A

Spoon offers a bare-bones rock album with the group's fifth full-length, 2005's Gimme Fiction. The tracks bounce along with undeniable intensity despite successful efforts at rhythmic minimalism; the production is crisp and clear (when it wants to be), ringing tones out at full vibrance and lighting up the arrangements.

At its core Gimme Fiction is a bustling nest of hooks and straight-forward guitars, piano, bass, and drums. But injected into this basic landscape is a multitude of distractors including sporadic guitars, melodramatic bursts of fuzz, reels of tape winding and flapping, and isolated riffs and count-offs, giving the album the feel of an intimate recording session made in the moment.

Though this implication of a live recording lies far from the truth (frontman Britt Daniel recorded most of the album himself), the atmospheric magic of the recording is not lost, making it one of the best rock albums of 2005.

- Justin de la Cruz

***

As I told Matt, while I was writing the review, I realized that I wanted to make it a full review (this was for an article that used many people's reviews of different albums and each is supposed to be about 100 words, instead of 3, 4, or [more usually, with me] 500 word reviews). Buuuut, I was away from the apartment (still at home-- wrote this over the break), and didn't have access to much else I wanted to write about... and it was kind of the last minute as well.