Spoon
Gimme Fiction (Deluxe Edition)
MERGE
9/10
“Once this record came out I felt like we were in the place we’d always wanted to be in,” Spoon frontman Britt Daniel states in the liner notes of Merge Records’ new deluxe, ten-year anniversary edition of the band’s seminal LP Gimme Fiction. “People gave a shit,” he says. Self-deprecation aside, with this 2005 album, Spoon delivered a taut, propulsive package—one that reconciled their frisky post-punk past with pure pop, establishing them as indie rock’s resident hit makers. Songs like the undeniable single “I Turn My Camera On” married the lithe funk of Prince to the motorik minimalism of Can or The Stones, coursing under the voyeuristic creeper-isms of Daniel. The coursing “Sister Jack” and Bond-theme beauty of “They Never Got You” showcased the band’s unique pop sensibility. The new edition comes complete with home demos, which range from acoustic sketches of tracks like “I Summon You” to a looping and sparse funk interpretation of “Was It You?”—which, as Daniel concedes in the liner notes, sounds better than the record version. People would continue to increasingly give shits about Spoon, and though Gimme Fiction smoothed a few of the rough edges that made albums like Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight so appealing, the group’s friskiness wasn’t sacrificed for the sake of accessibility. It was enhanced.
