Spoon's most recent four album run, culminating in probable career-to-date highlight Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (before it, Girls Can Tell, Kill The Moonlight and Gimme Fiction), is pretty much unimpeachable - four brilliant albums, all liberally studded with killer immediate standouts and slower-burning sleeper tracks.
Transference, though, I'm not yet so sure about. Every bar marks it as a Spoon album, from Britt Daniel's characteristic vocal tics to the taut, instantly identifiable grooves that form the heart of songs like "Is Love Forever?" and "I Saw The Light" to the piano/percussion lines that crop up throughout, especially on start-to-finish belter (and clearest moment of genius on the album) "Written in Reverse" - and it's good - but somehow it's not as sheerly exciting as their other recent work, not as utterly irresistible ... or at least not yet, cos I reckon that this one just may prove a grower with a vengeance, partly because it now seems much less disorienting and more loaded with pop thrills than it did on the first few spins, and partly because, well, it's a Spoon album, and it sounds like one, and that's a pretty clear indication of quality in itself.
