January 13, 1999
It’s a good thing that CDs are read by a beam of light rather than a needle scraping across the surface, or I would have worn out the grooves on this delicious slab of aluminum weeks ago. A Series of Sneaks is the catchiest album currently in rotation in my living room, and its obsessive appeal can be summed up in two words: The Pixies. Frankly derivative but dangerously relentless fun, the album sounds like nothing so much as Surfer Rosa with a beefy production job, assuming Black Francis took a powder to be replaced by Mick Jagger. The band has got the Pixies’ stop-start/loud-soft/barely-controlled-chaos down to a gene-splitting science, complete with feverish drumming, furious acoustic riffs and well-spaced bass pluckin’ bookended by rabid, trebly guitar punctuations that cram as many hooks into 2-minute songs as Customs will allow.
Frontman Britt Daniel doesn’t try for the high-pitched schizoid attack of Francis, instead strutting and swaggering his slurring, pouty baritone through the band’s busily bursting arrangements, trading wide-eyed lunacy for dark sex appeal. It works: repeating the phrase “30 Gallon Tank” over a droning, eighth-note bass line hardly sounds foreboding on paper, but c’mon, neither did “Oh My Golly!” Excellent slower numbers like “Metal Detektor” and “Advance Cassette” indicate that Spoon spun Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain more than once during their studio time. Sure, they wear their influences on their sleeves, lapels and caps, but we all gotta come from somewhere and these kids do their forebears proud – there isn’t a raw hook that doesn’t sink in, not a melody that doesn’t send you diving for the rewind button like a pre-teen girl after a Backstreet Boy's thrown underpants. And ultimately, A Series of Sneaks is more than just slavish imitation; as someone who thought that Bossanova was a muddy, half-hearted effort and Trompe le Monde too self-consciously arty, I’m tempted to file this fantastic effort next to Doolittle under What Might Have Been, but Spoon has enough cheeky personality to warrant a pedestal all their own.
- Jared O'Connor
swaggering, fractured, pop-punk