Review Summary: Spoon fans, come together with your hands
Even if there’s a spot among the most popular echelon of bands in the indie-verse for Spoon, it’s hard not to feel that they’re a little underappreciated. After all, there are not a lot of groups which have been releasing albums since the mid-90s without any true duds. The band may be firmly in the latter stages of their career (a greatest hits compilation even came out in 2019), but
Lucifer On The Sofa shows that their track record for excellence still holds true.
It seems significant to note that this album has been a long time coming. The record was mostly finished in 2020, but then the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the US, not only delaying the expected release but also resulting in additional songwriting and more recording sessions. In total, around thirty songs were written or recorded, with only ten eventually making it onto the finished product. The listener can get a sense of that, as the tunes which actually made the cut adhere to an impressive standard of quality.
Lucifer On The Sofa holds true to the band’s typical pattern, as it is immediately distinguishable as a Spoon album, while presenting a slightly different sonic facet than any of its predecessors. In this case, the style is leaning into the “rock” aspects of “indie rock”. Indeed,
Lucifer On The Sofa, taken as a whole, is probably the band’s hardest-rocking release, with the arguable exception of the group’s punk-tinged very early material. While maintaining the band’s penchant for smoothness and groove, the songs here are also heavy on taut guitar lines, jagged riffs and powered-up solos, and the work as a whole benefits from being played loud, something that I wouldn’t associate with most of the group’s previous output. In terms of atmosphere, the album acquires a sort of cinematic feel, like the soundtrack to some sleek urban artsy film, with a hint of menace lurking around every corner. One could certainly argue that much of the band’s music has maintained that edge, but it’s never been more gripping than here.
Intriguingly, the opening song here, “Held”, is a Smog cover, but the listener would never know it without either reading album notes or being familiar with the original, as it feels seamlessly like a Spoon product. It lays the framework for a first half of the album which is, by the band’s modest standards, quite aggressive, in some ways reminiscent of the harder-rocking tunes on
They Want My Soul. The second half is a bit more sonically varied, with standout tunes like the immensely smooth “Astral Jacket” and the luxurious title track, which mixes in a touch of the lounge jazziness which tinged 2017’s
Hot Thoughts.
Soundgarden-referencing summaries aside, Spoon deserve a round of applause for this one. Whether
Lucifer On The Sofa will go down as the default “best Spoon album” is up in the air, but the fact that it’s even in the conversation is quite an accomplishment for a band nearly three decades old. This is a coherent statement of intent that stands as one of the veterans’ most consistently impressive and engaging releases.
