Spoon – They Want My Soul (Loma Vista)

Spoon – They Want My Soul (Loma Vista)

When you crank out great music as consistently as Spoon does, it can become story-less. You might find people trying to impose a narrative where there’s only an inhumanly unerring band with a seemingly infinite selection of hooks. The story attached to They Want My Soul was that it was the long-awaited “return to form” after the first moderately disappointing album of their reign, 2010’s Transference. See, this is crazy, because Transference is a gem in the catalog — a dusty and shambolic take on the typically well-oiled Spoon mechanism. Bogus narrative aside, it does make for a fine symbiosis with They Want My Soul, an album that’s perhaps Spoon’s shiniest, grooviest, most nocturnal release yet, and feels all the more so for its comparison point with Transference. Whether in the impeccable pop of “Do You” or the shimmery synths of “Inside Out” and “New York Kiss,” this is Spoon at the height of their powers but injecting a few new colors into the mix — mostly a range of luminescent blues that work as well on a humid night walk through Manhattan as they do on a humid night drive through Florida. –Ryan [LISTEN]