Six Degrees of "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga"

Streamlined. Economical. Terse. Restrained. These are not traits that jump to mind when thinking about the anatomy of a successful pop group. Britt Daniel, songwriter and frontman for Spoon, has a monk-like adherence to creating music in this minimal mold, delivering a handful of uniquely sleek and subtle new wave-influenced indie rock albums over the last decade. Since 2001's breakout Girls Can Tell, Daniel has steadily tweaked the Spoon sound, angling occasionally towards skeletal and dark (Kill the Moonlight) and occasionally towards hip and groove-y ("I Turn My Camera On").

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon's most recent full-length, is probably their most thrilling: a spacious, loose album with several bona fide Big Pop Moments. The bouncy piano-n-horns numbers like "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" and "The Underdog" showcase a downright bombastic Daniel & Co. — these are bright, breezy, ambitious songs. Britt is keenly aware of the classic songwriting tradition he's mining, modeling "Underdog" after strummy Van Morrison and orchestrated Ray Davies. Spoon's indie status has never been about purposeful obscurantism, it's just that Daniel is obsessive about the details, crafting and re-crafting every sonic nook until it's gleaming and pristine.

On Ga Ga Spoon get a little more playful, a little more brash and end up with that perfect paradox: a fussily-created and insular album that simultaneously blooms with big, bold hooks. It's the perfect modern rock document, with echoes of current indie's wiry guitar fetish (the Strokes, Vampire Weekend) and strains of past pop classicism (ELO and Billy Joel) made rousing by one of our generation's finest songwriters.

The appeal of Jeff Lynne's Electric Light Orchestra is simple: big, winking deference to pop past (the Beatles, in particular) with a rich, playful futurism (voice modulation, synthesizers). Eldorado is the album where Lynne's mega-ambition (once stated as, "picking up where ‘I Am the Walrus' left off") coalesced with a studio full of goodies. Buoying falsetto-fueled piano-pop tunes with a 30-piece orchestra, Eldorado is lush and romantic. "Poorboy," a pretty simple Dylan-y romp at heart, flourishes amidst sweeping violin runs and sweet, multi-layered vocals. ELO's approach is more expansive and over-the-top, but both Lynne and Britt Daniel rely on bright bursts of piano — the bouncy, smirking moments on Ga Ga being the closest Daniel's come to an "Eldorado moment." Unsurprisingly, they are some of the most immediately satisfying moments of Spoon's career.

It's unlikely anyone has ever called Billy Joel a minimalist. Back when Spoon were making snappy, vaguely paranoid records like Kill the Moonlight, it was hard to imagine Britt Daniel ever being mentioned in the same sentence as Joel, master of the pomp ballad. One listen to "Only the Good Die Young" back-to-back with Ga Ga's "The Underdog," though, and it's clear that Spoon turned a corner at some point. The rollicking piano bounce, the playful horns, the handclaps: these songs are kissin' cousins, big and unapologetic.

Still, The Stranger is a much showier affair than Ga Ga — even with legendary producer Phil Ramone urging Joel to streamline the arrangements, the album feels sweeping and campy in a way that Daniel could probably never stomach. Where Spoon is terse and sarcastic, Joel is brazen and heart-on-sleeve. His songwriting is classic Broadway, with gaudy melodies and didactic tales about neighborhood kids "workin' in the grocery store" and how "everybody has a dream." Joel is pure showman and The Stranger is his defining act.

Vampire Weekend surprised everyone in 2008, not only with a curious set of influences (African guitar-pop, Paul Simon, Talking Heads), but with its subsequent runaway success. On the surface, VW has a shockingly unadorned sound: a single electric guitar, spindly, playful drumming and subtle string arrangements. The production is straight out of the Spoon playbook: simple, subtle and spacious. "Oxford Comma" is a charmingly syncopated shuffle, every element meticulously separated in the mix and distilled — soft keyboard stabs, a lithe, snaking guitar line and wistful cooing about, err, punctuation. Although they're not always sonic sisters (Spoon doesn't come nearly as close to dabbling with chamber-pop as VW does), the bands share a purposeful attention to detail, creating similarly stark and concise worlds.

The whole "return of rock" thing was a bit of a red herring, wasn't it? In 2001, though, it was hard not to get swept up in the excitement when Is This It? dropped, fully-formed, effortlessly cool and completely irresistible. The Strokes' vital success, looking past the sunglasses and the torn jeans and the New York City-ness of it all, was creating an album with no wasted moments. Even the solos are catchy! As exciting as Is This It? sounds, it also feels distinctly economical — chugging, Velvet Underground-y downstroke guitar riffs, right-out-the-garage production, Julian Casablancas' lazy drawl. It strikes the same perfect balance as Ga Ga: it's fun, but it's no-frills fun, simple and sweet.

"There's more to life than disco-beat guitar music." Somewhat hilariously, bassist Bob Hardy felt compelled to clarify this after Franz Ferdinand's, well, disco-beat guitar single "Take Me Out" was so successful it moved the song past blogs and into hockey arenas. This is not to say that Franz have no ambition: the lead single from their second album, "Do You Want To" is much more "My Sharona" than Gang of Four — it's revved-up and glammy and swaggering. Franz is like Spoon in that, ultimately, they make pop music that masquerades as indie rock. These guys are indie the way Blondie was punk — the spirit, the influences, the haircuts. The songs, though, they're sleek and immediate and meant to be hits. Put "Do You" or "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" next to "Heart of Glass" and you'll see what I mean.