Telephono / Soft Effects

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

Many bands' early work becomes frozen in time as their most representative, no matter how much they might change over time. (See Pavement and the Beastie Boys, for example.) But each successive album by Austinites Spoon has not only refined the band's basic sound, it's also been more popular than the last. So for people who became fans via the streamlined likes of 2005's Gimme Fiction, 2002's Kill the Moonlight or 2001's Girls Can Tell, Merge's reissue of the group's first two releases will come as a surprise. 1996's Telephono slots straight into its era: noisy indie rock that owes a whole lot of its steez to the Pixies. While lead singer-songwriter Britt Daniel's now-familiar dry demeanor is already in place, he cuts it with some positively Black Francis-esque screams ("Dismember" even features Kim Deal-like backing vocals), and the songs are similarly short, with five of 14 under two minutes, including the surfy instrumental "Theme from Wendel Stivers." Thing is, Daniel was exceptionally good at writing in Black Francis' style. But on the album's final pair of tracks, "The Government Darling" and "Plastic Mylar," he’s beginning to write in his own, which is a lot more interesting.

Those two songs make a smart stepping-stone to Soft Effects, the 1997 EP that makes up the second part of this package, and the release where Daniel sheds his Pixies fixation and begins cutting his own path. The difference is dramatic: even when the ghost of Black Francis rears its head on "Get Out of the State," Daniel's sexy-drowsy vocal undercuts it, while the sand-blast guitars that bring it to its end owe lots of people but sound, ultimately, like Spoon. And "Loss Leaders" could have been on any latter-day Spoon album; only its relative scruffiness dates it to a time before Daniel became indie rock's nattiest formalist.