Spoon

With their 2007 album “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” Britt Daniel and Spoon came dangerously close to being thrust from the not-quite-popular middle ground they had inhabited for at least a decade. 2002’s “Kill the Moonlight” was a critical favorite and 2005’s “Gimme Fiction” was the album that launched a thousand soundtracks, but “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” was, perhaps inadvertently, tailor-made for success in 2007 (The stripped-down rock thing worked great that year, just ask Radiohead). Six albums in, Spoon suddenly had consistent radio play and record sales, and more than just music critics realized that Spoon just might be the best American rock band of the 00s.

It’s hard not to look at Spoon’s new album, “Transference,” as something of a reaction to that success. “Before destruction a man’s heart is haughty,” Daniel, quoting Proverbs, begins the album. With his penchant for writing rock music about rock music, the intention to step back a bit seems clear. And throughout “Transference,” the elements that made its predecessor an instant classic—horns, conventional pop structure, songs with more that two chords—are thrown out in favor of a deliberately unpolished sound recalling the band’s lesser-known 90s work.

The shift is both regression and release. For the first time since 1998’s “A Series of Sneaks,” Daniel applies the same ferocity to his vocals as he does towards his one-chord guitar solos. “I want to show you how I love you, but there’s nothing there / I’m not standing here / Oh I’m not standing here,” he yells on “Written in Reverse,” the album’s bluntest approach to its running themes of heartbreak and self-doubt. As its initially clunky piano riff gives way to harsh outbursts of bass and guitar, “Written in Reverse” emerges as a pummeling, persistent beast, closing out the otherwise tightly-wound A-side with well-earned fury.

At the other end of the album’s emotional spectrum, “Out Go the Lights” finds Daniel at his most vulnerable. “There’s a picture of you / standing there in my black wig / looking like, who thinks they know who?” he laments. His frankest song since 2001’s “Anything You Want,” the nostalgic misery finds directness in small lyrical details and Jim Eno’s unbroken backbeat. The pounding “Is Love Forever?” takes a more existential approach to love lost. “When I’m older, start to wonder, was that love or instinct working? / Have I even felt it ever?” Daniel asks on one vocal track, while its counterpart screams over staccato guitar chords.

Manipulation of multiple vocal tracks gives “Transference” a schizophrenic quality. Daniel’s voice suddenly cuts out at the climax of “Is Love Forever?,” returning a second later to ask the titular question in a flood of echoes. “Trouble Comes Running” interweaves two tracks that overlap haphazardly at times. Background hums that materialize and suddenly disappear are scattered throughout the record. Though jarring at first, the unusual mixing decision becomes an essential element of “Transference,” where vocal fragments complement lyrical subject matter within confident, upbeat instrumental performance.

But even with changes in structure and a couple new studio tricks, the songs on “Transference” succeed first and foremost because they are Spoon songs: crisp, tightly crafted, and catchy. Already with an unfathomable five great albums under their belt, the band continues to hone and perfect. “Who Makes Your Money” is the sleek slow-burner Daniel has been trying to write for years, with its midway shift from bass to guitar creating the album’s sublime peak. Even the least thrilling tracks on “Transference”—piano ballad “Goodnight Laura” and the meandering, bass-heavy “Nobody Gets Me But You”—are unmistakably the work of seasoned veterans. At a point in their career where a merely adequate post-breakthrough record would suffice, “Transference” finds Spoon extending their remarkable streak into a third decade. Like each of its five predecessors, it may be their best.

—Staff writer Jeffrey W. Feldman can be reached at jfeldman@fas.harvard.edu.