'Gimme' an indie superhero

Musically, 2002 was a breathtaking year -- we saw the life-changing advent of Interpol, the glorious manifestation of Beck's sadness, the amphetamine tremors of Hot Hot Heat, the face-breaking fury of … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, to name a few. We also saw a record by a band that got dropped from its label a few years back to little fanfare, a record whose simplicity and crackling execution dropped jaws across the country. \n That album was Spoon's Kill the Moonlight, and I listed all those bands because their follow-ups induced shoulder shrugs and sighs from fans whose hopes had been neither dashed nor fulfilled. \nGimme Fiction is not one of those albums. Gimme Fiction is the best album of 2005 so far, the best follow-up to any of recent indie superhero successes. It's a "most" album for Spoon, the most diverse album that Spoon has ever put together, the most coherent (hell, the opening track subtly introduces every subsequent song) and the most mature, by far. "The Beast and Dragon, Adored" continues Spoon's cat-and-mouse alternation between thunderous melody and near silence. "The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine" is their best piano ballad so far, thankfully short enough to not wear out its welcome. "I Turn My Camera On" is a musical vacuum filled only by a chugging one-two bass line and a sparse rhythm section.\n"My Mathematical Mind" is the second-best song on the album, a track that opens with keys not dissimilar to songs from 2001's Girls Can Tell. However, whereas Spoon used to be all about repetition, they've discovered the art of progression. This song manages to build from its opening simplicity into a thundering inferno of loose drumming and guitar tectonics, and its final explosion is entirely sublime. The dark first half of the album culminates in "The Delicate Place." This song inhabits the same moody twilight as songs like "Paper Tiger," except it starts from nothing and turns into something by the end -- it turns into all-out rock fireworks. \nThe second half opens with two startlingly sunny numbers that surprise and delight: "Sister Jack" and "I Summon You." From there, Gimme Fiction plunges back into moodiness with "The Infinite Pet" and "Was it You," the former featuring a chunked-up riff and the latter being entirely in keeping with Spoon's minimalist sensibilities. "They Never Got You" is probably too long, but its droning, muted bass and '80s handclaps play background music to what sounds like e-bow action on the guitar. The album closes with "Merchants of Soul." It's a good song, spacious and punctuated with stabs of piano and viola.\nGimme Fiction is an album that encourages fans to let fly their unabashedly high hopes that their favorite bands can only get better; it's a reason to keep liking music amid this year's acid rain of disappointing follow-ups, or to keep liking music at all. The band is Spoon, the album is Gimme Fiction and you should own it.