The band Spoon returns with a ‘great rock ‘n’ roll document’

NEW YORK (AP) — The band Spoon has taken a sonic fork within the street and, appropriately sufficient, the primary single from their new album mentions one other piece of silverware — a knife.

“The Hardest Cut” — full with the road “we live on a knife” — roars with a darkish, grunge-meets-’70s guitar vitality, a sign of what’s to come back from the Texas-based band on their 10-track, 10th album, “Lucifer on the Sofa.”

“We wanted to make a rock ‘n’ roll record, a great rock ‘n’ roll record,“ says frontman Britt Daniel. ”I simply don’t really feel like there’s sufficient nice rock ‘n’ roll information being made lately.”

“Lucifer on the Sofa” through Matador Records is a flip towards extra muscular, minimalist traditional rock, extra aggressive and rehearsed than the band’s predecessor “Hot Thoughts,” the place synths had been distinguished and songs constructed on the fly.

“We always tend to want to react a bit against the record we just did. That last record was more of a pieced together record, a produced record. It was a record where a lot of times we started recording and we didn’t know what the song really was,” says Daniel.

For “Lucifer on the Sofa,” drummer Jim Eno says Spoon tried to lean into Texas rock and early ZZ Top, utilizing extra actual devices than results.

“The stuff that sounds like a band playing in a room has always been the kind of records that we grew up listening to. So it was trying to capture some of that,” says Eno.

Daniel estimates the brand new album was two-thirds carried out when the pandemic hit in March 2020. “I found myself with a lot of alone time and I wrote a lot more songs. That was the thing that kind of made me feel normal during the harshest part of lockdown,” he says.

While some songs the band had been kicking round for a couple of years, a number of had been knowledgeable by the pandemic, together with the “The Devil & Mister Jones” a few unhealthy dude and “Wild,” concerning the drudgery of life.

“We like to challenge ourselves and not repeat ourselves,” says Eno. “I feel like some bands may just have the exact same formula over and over again, and I feel like we try not to do that.”

The album begins with a canopy of Smog’s “Held” and chugs alongside in a rock vein till getting a bit of spacey with “Astral Jacket” and “Satellite,” earlier than taking a bizarre and funky detour with the title observe.

“The lucifer on the sofa is me,” says Daniel. “It’s the character that I can become when I’m at my worst. And I think a lot of people have that same kind of character. Nobody is the same person at all times and at times of distress bad things tend to come out.

“Whenever I recognize that person come out, I try to get past it. My way of trying to get past it in this song is to get up off that sofa.”

Members of Spoon have recently returned to Austin full-time and Daniel says he’s most having fun with listening to dwell music every day.

“It’s a town where it’s all about live performances and bands that are doing it because it’s fun and not doing it with an eye on the music industry,” he says. “It’s the life I like.”

Spoon is getting nice critiques for the brand new clutch of songs, with Rolling Stone saying it may be the band’s greatest document and Paste journal calling it “the sound of a band in peak form who are pushing to get better, go further and resist any temptation to slack off.”

That’s a far cry from the times when Spoon had been dropped by Elektra Records and had issue convincing anybody to place out their “Girls Can Tell” album. Daniel was suggested to vary the band’s title. It was thought of broken items.

“Maybe that would have been the smart thing to do, but we didn’t do it that way,” he remembers. “We somehow found an audience and then labels were more welcome to putting out our records.”

The band plans to tour with the brand new materials, kicking off dwell reveals on April 6 in Boston and ending June four in Phoenix. Along the way in which, they’ll make stops in, amongst different cities, New York, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles.

Daniel and Eno are desperate to play dwell once more and completely satisfied how “Lucifer on the Sofa” ended up. “I think Britt’s writing the best songs that he’s ever written,” says Eno. “When you’re in a band with a great songwriter, everything can fall together a lot more easily.”

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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits