Katie Cameron
A&E Editor
Right off the bat, there are two remarkable things about Spoon’s new album Hot Thoughts. The first is that after nine albums, Austin-based alt-rock band Spoon is still producing interesting and good music. The group’s been together for more than twenty years — in indie years, that’s essentially an eternity, given the blink-and-you-missed-‘em-while-they-were-hip nature of the genre. Not only does Hot Thoughts maintain the quality of Spoon’s music, but it also reimagines the band’s sound.
That’s the second quality worth noting about the album: at times, it’s pretty damn weird, but it works. As a follow-up to 2014’s They Want My Soul (which leaned more toward the pop side of pop-rock) Hot Thoughts is comparatively out there. One track, titled “WhisperI’lllistentohe,arit” sounds haunting as fuzzy synthesizer mimics ghostly howls before the drums kick in and send the track into overdrive. There’s a lot of stress on the album, veiled under hazy instrumentation and tongue-in-cheek lyrics.
Other tracks — “Pink Up,” “Can I Sit Next You,” “Do I Have to Talk You Into It” — dabble in a psychedelic sound that’s new to Spoon’s music. Dave Fridmann, producer for psychedelic rock darlings the Flaming Lips, helped produce the album. These three songs rely heavily on synthesizer melodies more familiar to East Coast music. The psychedelic sounds in collision with lead singer Britt Daniel’s hypnotic, almost monotone vocals combine to create an album that’s both undeniably anxious and dreamy.
True to Spoon’s previous albums, some songs on Hot Thoughts are the carefully constructed three-minute pop-rock hits that the group is known for. personal ghosts resurface as Daniel describes feeling dispossessed by an ex-lover on the catchy “First Caress”; the song rocks out to a thumping, looping disco beat and some strange lyrical references to coconut water.
Equally addictive is the album’s penultimate track “Shotgun.” The song is about another failed relationship, but this time, it’s a fight song. Daniel quips about dreams of shared medical and dental insurance collapsing, and describes the imploding relationship as a shotgun at a fistfight. Despite the heavy content, the song transforms from a grungy rock song into a great house beat-laden dance track. It’s great to groove to, if you don’t listen too hard.
The album ends with “Us,” a five-minute instrumental. Partially experimental jazz, partially recurrent pop melodies from previous tracks on the album, the song gives us a chance to reflect on the album as a whole. Thematically, “Us” is an abbreviated version of the album: it’s a combination of psychedelic distortion, catchy musical hooks and a healthy dose of introspective gloom.
Hot Thoughts has some real bite, and for hardcore Spoon fans, it may feel like a departure from the band’s highly-methodical pop-rock style — and that’s a fair criticism, because it is. But more than anything, Hot Thoughts works because there’s something for everyone in its layers. Maybe Spoon is begging us to hear what we want to hear in the album’s psychedelic fuzz, but how many other albums about existential anxiety can have you dancing in your dorm room?