Spoon — Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Every once in a while when you're reviewing a record close to deadline you panic that you haven't heard it enough. I sincerely thought I'd listened to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga five or six times at most before I turned it on to start writing about it. Then it hit me that I'd actually played it a far greater number of times and that all of the material was incredibly familiar. I guess that's kind of the thing about Spoon. Since Britt Daniel's crew haven't changed their sound much since Girls Can Tell, it's so easy to absorb. And the band sound like they're producing excellent pop almost effortlessly at this point. I don't want to demean the effort that went into perfect pop pieces like "The Underdog" and "Finer Feelings" because I know they're the product of a songwriter who puts a lot of thought into his work. Instead, I mean it more as a compliment. Daniel has pumped out an extremely worthy follow-up to his biggest success without breaking so much as a few drops of sweat, and that's oddly refreshing.

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