All these soulsuckers, they’re among us. They’re stealing our privacy, our convictions, the very essence of our being, and leaving behind little more than a “for sale” sign and some vague, constant hollowness. In music, a dwindling whirlpool of funds only spurs on these parasites as they scavenge for scraps of humanity wherever ears can hear. Their thirst is real. And artists—those blasphemous and holy conduits for truth, liberty, and whatever else is missing from our lives—can’t help but succumb. To last more than 20 years in rock’n’roll without sacrificing a lethal amount of one’s soul requires a certain vigilance; to navigate around the pitfalls of both punk and ambition without tripping-up on either can seem just as hard as making a great album. But Spoon, one of the most stand-up bands of their generation, have figured all of this out. On their eighth album, they laugh in the face of leeches, defy gravity, suspend time. “All they want’s my soul, yes, yes, I know!” hollers Britt Daniel, stretching every crevice of his 43-year-old throat. His message is clear: They can’t have it.
Spoon’s soul is theirs alone. It’s not James Brown’s soul, and though Daniel was raised Christian in conservative small-town Texas, it’s not God’s soul, either. It’s not exactly classic rock, not quite post-punk. It’s not the soul of indie idealists blindly conflating modesty and virtue. Instead, this band is about capturing the unknown—those “finer feelings,” as Daniel once put it—and simply letting it float. Many of their songs are meticulously crafted, but they also breathe and break with crackling spontaneity. Theirs is an in-between soul happily seeking limbo as its own destination. It’s manly in an old-fashioned way, but still scuffed-up and vulnerable. It’s allergic to empty sentiment. It’s smart but not eggheaded, tough but not dumb. It’s Costello, Lennon, Can, and the Cure. It’s all-knowing and hopelessly fallible, mysterious with a purpose. It’s going to be crushed by life and love, and it’s going to endure.
They Want My Soul is the quintet’s most booming LP, eons ahead of their Pixies-worshipping beginnings and a far cry from the relatively small-scale charm of their early-2000s touchstones Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight, as well as their self-consciously lo-fi 2010 record, Transference. The album sounds like a proper follow-up to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the clear-eyed 2007 LP where everything clicked into place and a restless band finally hammered themselves into stone. Some of the new record’s sonic forthrightness comes courtesy of two indie-hit-making producers new to Spoon’s world: über-pro Joe Chiccarelli, who’s worked with everyone from Frank Zappa to the Shins to Jazon Mraz over the last 35 years, and psychedelic guru Dave Fridmann, who’s helped turn unapologetic weirdos Flaming Lips and MGMT into festival headliners. Spoon, who also co-produced every song on the album, lie somewhere between those two poles—pop and outré—and the triangulations happening throughout They Want My Soul flow out unencumbered. These songs rip and burst and go.
As guitar rock continues its slow and inevitable transition into a bygone art, They Want My Soul pulls at familiar threads, fraying things to make them seem now, if not new. There’s an inherent nostalgia in the kind of alchemy Spoon are mixing up here, and the band is wise enough not to shy away from it. But instead of glowing in the light of good times past, They Want My Soul is constantly negotiating with the memories that make up our minds, trying to decide if they’re traps or blessings. “Do You” plays it both ways, starting off with Daniel wistfully reminiscing about vomiting on a curb—“I was half out of a bag,” he grins—before zooming out with a succinct world-weariness that comes from chronicling humanity’s small giveaways for more than two decades: “You tiptoe for ages, but lose yourself/Flippin’ back pages, unbuckling belts.” Daniel has talked about how he was a “mean and ornery” teenage outcast, and much of his subsequent years have been spent wearing-down that sharpness with empathy while trying to retain bits of its hard-nosed rigor. On the barreling “Rainy Taxi,” he has trouble living in the grays, describing an all-or-nothing romance he can’t help but fall for. “When you stand beside me I feel something stronger than I ever could,” he says with hope, before the ultimatum: “But if you leave you better run away for good.” A happy ending is a boring ending.
And who wants an ending anyway? “Inside Out” finds submissive contentment amidst a drift that hints at eternity. “There’s intense gravity in you,” Daniel lilts, “I’m just your satellite.” And then the track willingly enters that ether as koi-pond synths twinkle in the distance, its tranquility tempered by the fact that Spoon have never made a song quite this pretty before. So have Spoon gone soft? Have they been watered-down by commercially-minded collaborators? Have they crushed the DIY dream by leaving indie utopia label Merge? They Want My Soul makes such questions sound about as petty and irrelevant as the thousands of bands that have come and gone (or come, gone, and reunited) since Daniel and drummer Jim Eno started Spoon in the months just before Kurt Cobain’s death. They didn’t burn out. They’re not fading away.
