In his author’s note for his new collection, “Double Trio,”—a box set of three volumes of new poetry—Nathaniel Mackey talks about the work encompassing a “long song.” Mackey’s referring to the two long poems he’s been writing over the course of several decades and several collections, “Song of the Andoumboulou,” and “Mu.” The individual sections of the poems themselves take up various forms and topics, but the overall shape and trajectory of the long song, the feeling of it, continues throughout separate works (the vibe of it even appears in Mackey’s epistolary novels, “From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate”).
This is all to say that Spoon, and the band’s excellent new album, “Lucifer on the Sofa,” seems committed to the same kind of project. A consistently high-quality exploration of particular themes and topics and emotions through an aesthetic that is wholly theirs but that changes in aspects both major and minor from album to album and song to song. A long song that the band’s been creating for almost 30 years. You know a Spoon song when you hear one—Britt Daniel’s voice, Jim Eno’s drums, the great production—but you don’t always know what you’re going to get, where the song’s going to go.
“Lucifer on the Sofa” is a classic rock album, according to the band, and that’s evident in the choices the band makes on the songs: big beats from Eno’s percussion, aggressive and swaggering vocals from Daniel, lots of great guitar solos, sounds, outbursts. As usual with Spoon, you get melodies and hooks that stick with you for weeks on end (with almost every Spoon album I’ve ever heard, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with the songs in my head—this happens more with them than maybe any other band). “Lucifer on the Sofa” also has some of the bigger-sounding songs they’ve done recently: “Wild” is a soaring, beautiful song, up there with “Underdog” in terms of the band’s poppiest tunes; “Held,” a Smog cover, brings back some of the straight-to-the-point vocals and cascading guitars from songs like “The Beast and Dragon Adored;” “The Hardest Cut” is one of their best guitar songs, sort of austere and simple, with a great solo towards the end; and “On the Radio” is a huge, driving song, a tremendous riff backed by great bass and piano, with a satisfying build-up at the end.
This album sounds fun and loose, like the band had a blast making it. There’s tossed-off remarks here and there throughout the songs—Britt asks to do the fill twice as long on “Held,” someone says “that’s right” in the background of “Devil and Mister Jones,” Britt or someone else laughs in the middle of “Feels Alright.” As a half-pandemic album—the band apparently started working on it in fall 2019—you can also hear a lot of prominent pandemic-era concerns on this record: a desire for tenderness and warmth (“Held,” “My Babe,” and “Satellite” are all pretty romantic) and a longing for adventure or connection (on songs like “Wild” and the title track—which sounds so desolate and lonely).
Speaking of the title track, it features a prime example of Daniel’s ability to bend and elide his lyrics and sing them in a way that’s instantly memorable. Here’s the way I’d write the line if someone asked me to transcribe it formally: “What am I’m going to do/with your last cigarettes/all your old records/all your old cassettes.” Here’s how Daniel sings it: “Whad’ma gonna do/wit your last cigarettes/all your old records/all your old cassettes.” He’s done this throughout the band’s discography, eliding syllables, chomping through words, making the least-expected choice to abbreviate or combine to make the line leaner or hit harder.
Thinking about “Lucifer on the Sofa,” one of the most impressive things to me about Spoon is that the band has released so many albums where every single song on the album is good. Every song has something to offer. That is an insane level of artistic achievement. How can a band be so incredibly good for so long? It’s staggering to think about.