kpdexter

Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Induces New Album Fever

Posted by kpdexter

Jul 102007

My music loving buddies and I have a term, I don’t know if we invented it or not, but we use it all the time, it’s called New Album Fever. New Album Fever can best be described as the instant love of a new album by a favorite band, the proclamation of it as the best album since… New Album Fever, like most fevers, eventually goes away, and you realize that actually, now that the initial excitement has worn off, the album really isn’t that good. Bands like Wilco, The White Stripes, and Radiohead, all are known to cause varying degrees of New Album Fever.

Spoon’s last album, Gimme Fiction, the follow-up to the massively critically acclaimed Kill the Moonlight, induced a huge case of the Fever with me. It pushed all the right pleasure buttons, but really didn’t hold up for me over the long haul. I know a few of you will remember that it was one of our early Thursday Selection albums, and it was under the really close scrutiny I gave it then, that I came to the realization that other than a handful of songs, it wasn’t a very good album.

So I came upon the new Spoon album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, with a feeling that they had to prove something to me as a listener. Would they continue in the vein of Gimme Fiction, which not only lacked cohesion, but also lacked a real identity? Would this album be a return of the experimentalism of Kill The Moonlight, or would it be a return of the Pixies meets GBV sound of their first two albums?

The answer is really none of the above. This album feels like their transitional third LP, Girls Can Tell, which coincidentally is also my second-favorite Spoon album. And like that album, it has a laid-back, confident, more mature feel. Don’t read too much into that, they’re still trying some new things, and they pull them off too, but more on that in a minute!

Don’t Make Me A Target
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HEAR FACTOR: THEM DAMN HIPPIES

Posted by kpdexter

May 192007

Download entire Damn Hippies! (.zip)

When I finally found my Hear Factor cd, conveniently stashed under the couch by Mrs. kpdexter, I was excited to see so many titles I was unfamiliar with. The Traffic titles were a pleasant surprise to me, I guess I never considered them a hippie band, though “You Can All Join In” certainly has that feel, generally a feel-good kind of song.

Now, “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” has always held a special place in my heart, and it excited me to see it here. I often reflect back on Halloween 1991, enjoyed at the Halloween Mecca, Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio. A carload of us drove the 3-hour trip from Dayton to Athens, armed only with 12-packs of Milwaukee’s Best Light, a few packs of smokes, some low-grade weed (of which I did not partake), and a bunch of shitty cassettes, a mixture of Canned Heat, early Ween, some weird Beach Boys stuff, a few Dead boots, and a Traffic mix tape. Now, the ride down was relatively uneventful, the driver was a bit paranoid because of all the contraband, and the fact that several of us were underage as well, so we played it cool, we sipped some beers and played some music, and talked about shit, school, and whatnot. We played some crappy Dead tape on the way there, and all lamented the fact that we were unable to score any psychedelics for the trip. I remember a rousing version of Franklin’s Tower>Help on the Way>Slipknot, but not much else, it was a pretty standard setlist, nothing too earth shattering.
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