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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2009 > June > 29 > Entry
EP review: Spoon ‘Got Nuffin’
Spoon
‘Got Nuffin’ EP
(Merge)
A-
I love a good non-album single. They’re almost a subgenre of their own, a cult within the rock ‘n’ roll religion. The format is great — a brief musical comment, no more than three songs, none of the contextual weight of a full album. The only obligations are to be memorable and exist on their own. They hark back to a time when the single, not the album, was the key format. The slow death of the CD has given rise to the individually leaked track, sometimes far ahead of an album, but that’s not quite the same thing. Fugazi’s “Song Number One,” the Cure’s “Charlotte Sometimes” and, say, the Clash’s “Bankrobber” all deserve a place on a nerdy, “non-album singles” playlist. The Smiths seemed to be able to knock them off in their sleep.
Add “Got Nuffin” to that storied list. A driving drumbeat, a droning New Wave bassline, it’s all tension and torsion, with only flashes of fuzzy, spiky guitar solo. Britt Daniel’s high-strung voice flirts with liberation: “I’ve got nothin’ to loose but darkness and shadows/ Got nothing but emptiness and hang-ups.” It’s both classic Spoon and a small twist on their sound and does exactly what a non-album single should do — remind you that the band is still working and still making great music and get you excited for what is to come.
The B-sides are very much B-sides — experiments that escaped from the lab. “Tweakers” is a muddy, ultra-lo-fi mix of a stuttered drum loop and flashes of organ? guitar? It sounds like something that might morph into a higher-rez song in the future. “Stroke their Brains” sounds a heck of a lot like the Strokes and, to paraphrase Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman,” in no way is that a bad thing. None of this small pile of awesome is a bad thing.
Spoon plays three nights at Stubb’s, July 9-11. Information: stubbsaustin.com.
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