Spoon - They Want My Soul (2014) Vinyl

Spoon's eighth album is their most booming LP, most resembling a companion piece to 2007's masterwork Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Joe Chiccarelli and Dave Fridmann share co-production credits along with the band themselves, and They Want My Soul pulls at familiar threads, fraying things to make them seem now.

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.