Review Summary: Spoon blends abrupt instrumentals with smooth voice to produce a beautiful album.
I always believed that an infant’s cry was one of the most annoying things on earth. I recall a couple of times trying to sleep off a 6 hour flight but couldn’t because of the dreaded crying baby. It honestly makes you want to put a bullet in you head. Not to sound like too much of a Grinch but it is just a loud, abrupt and ear shattering noise! Well when I decided to get Spoon’s 6th effort
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga I immediately noticed the unusual title, the mocking of a crying infant, and immediately I became skeptical, but the outcome wasn’t as bad as I thought.
What is similar to a baby crying are the instrumentals. In that they are very repetitive and staccato which is shown in the first track
Don’t Make Me a Target. You get that feeling immediately when you hear a short, choppy guitar riff that goes into a simple drumbeat and vocals. But the best example of this mood of instrumentals is
The Ghost of You Lingers with the entire song being a couple of piano chords being repeated over and over again being layered over with heavily reverbed and echoed vocals. With these first two songs, you understand what they’re getting at with the theme of their instrumentals. Short, fast and choppy. Not only does this resemble the album title by being repetitive and abrupt, but in
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb and
Underdog there are blaring trumpets to add on to the disjointed instrumentals. On the contrary of the instrumentals, heavily representing the aspects of an upset baby, are the vocals. Britt Daniel’s voice can be described as smooth, flowing with a hint of raspyness. He even hits some high notes every once in a while with songs like
The Ghost of You Lingers and
Don’t You Evah.
This brings me to my next point of how the vocals and the instrumentals act as complementary foils for each other. Without the vocals the instrumentals would be annoying and hasty, but without the instrumentals the voice would have nothing to to be backed up with. But when they act together the instrumentals make it so the voice is smooth enough to relax to, and the voice makes the instrumentals thumpy and punchy enough to bob your head and tap your foot to. When these two components act together it makes for a smooth and beautiful album.
When I look back to the beginning to the review I find myself dreading an infant’s wail but now at the end I find my self talking about smooth, beautiful instrumentals and vocals acting together. Rather than thinking of the loud, screech of a baby’s cry I’m thinking of the innocence and of an infant’s laugh.
Pros:
Smooth vocals
Vocals and Drums blend unusually well
Cons:
Choppy instrumentals can get annoying at times
