The nation’s critics have duly bestowed their substantial and yet lukewarm praise on Hot Thoughts. In truth, it’s Spoon’s best and most accomplished album in what has been a staggering run starting with Telephono in 1996. The only competition for their best LP is Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, but then Transference is terrific too. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, Hot Thoughts is not the “interesting” late-period effort of established pros. No, it’s the bracing fulfillment of promises made as far back as that first album.

In the past few years Britt Daniel has had the artistic integrity to push himself ever deeper into adventurous climes, and the result has been a series of riotously propulsive and intermittently messy masterpieces that nevertheless seldom feel anything less than contemporary and wrought. Together, Daniel and Eno have been defining the state of the art of rock music for a stretch now. In the vibrancy of their textural landscapes and the density of their musical ideas, they resemble nobody as much as ... well, Kanye West comes to mind.

In case you didn’t know: I’ve followed Spoon as closely as I’ve followed any band. In 1998 I saw them play to an audience of eight in Providence in what was probably the same week that Elektra unceremoniously dumped them. In 2002 I was in the exultant Bowery Ballroom audience that, as with one voice, welcomed Britt Daniel to his rightful place among indie rock royalty after a season or three in the wilderness—a coronation that featured a bouquet of roses lofted at the stage during the sweaty second encore. In 2010 I watched a triumphant Daniel, at the cavernous arc that is Radio City Music Hall, crash up against the strict midnight curfew in a show he clearly wished would never end.

When Spoon first arrived, the obvious touchstone was Wire. The unexpected glory of Britt Daniel is that he was not content to run Texas’ most honed and enignmatic power trio. The man has evidently been inhaling Philip Glass and Brian Eno of late; in their spirit, every album sets standards that are unmistakably its own.
 
Bandwagoneers fond of stumbling upon Spoon’s music in automobile advertisements or Will Ferrell vehicles will insist that Spoon’s strongest period “obviously” starts with Girls Can Tell. Don’t believe it. That album and the next two merely laid an inoffensive foundation for the intrepid and great albums that begin with 2008’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. That run of releases has catapulted producer Jim Eno (who also drums) into a category of one; nobody in the landscape is producing albums with as much care and skill. (Here’s a lofty comparison: If Girls Can Tell is Spoon’s Revolver, this latest album is something like their Abbey Road/White Album, as you please.)

The Spoon albums of the last decade bear some similarities to the second half of Beck’s career, during which he has put out a lot of accomplished, resonant albums that never quite got their due, c’est la vie. But Daniel is undertaking comparable feats with no net, cutting songs off mid-phrase, generating soundtrack music for a very cerebral Charles Bronson movie of my invention. Every Spoon song sounds confident as fuck, and that’s the residue as well as the purpose of Eno’s production. The background is constantly pulsating with gusts of chord.

One doesn’t exactly go to Spoon for sincerity; Daniel’s enigmas were always unresolvable and, by the bye, vastly more fun unresolved anyway. Ever the searcher, Daniel has always absorbed his influences with unusual diligence. For years now he has assigned himself the obligation of honoring all of his influences as unremittingly as he is capable ... This year the murderer’s row consists of Coltrane, Moroder, Grandmaster Flash, John Carpenter, Kraftwerk, Bowie circa Lodger, Jim O’Rourke….. that weight can’t be easy, but well, he manages it.

It’s a fact that Hot Thoughts grows unkempt as it careens toward its beatific conclusion. The album’s first two songs, “Hot Thoughts” and “WhisperI’lllistentohearit,” combine funk, atmosphere, and forward momentum as well as anything Spoon has done since “Finer Feelings” off of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The album’s hypnotic and endlessly interesting fulcrum, “Pink Up,” which carries the listener to the second needle drop, resembles a locale Yo La Tengo would’ve loved to stake out but could never quite find. Some of the late numbers overstay their welcome by a modalic cycle or two, a point that all the reviews dutifully mentioned. The criticism has no bite, however, for the simple reason that every passage on the album is so pleasurable in a pure sonic sense, and that’s a tradeoff I’ll take every time.

Everywhere I look I see the grievance that albums today just aren’t as formally daring as Disraeli Gears and Man-Machine and Station to Station or what have you.

Hey—over here! Here’s one, right under your nose!

Your loss!

Here’s the title track (but do treat yourself to the full album):