A Musical Crossroads

Though it may sound like the title of a low-budget horror movie, They Want My Soul, the eighth album from Austin’s Spoon, steers clear of anything remotely terrifying in the traditional sense of the word, though frontman Britt Daniel does urge listeners to “run run run run run” on “Rainy Taxi,” whose minor-tinged melodies give it a slightly ominous feel, and the creepy, shivering synths that end “Do You” are also surprisingly hair-raising, especially after such a radio-ready, bland track. On this, their first release since 2010’s Transference and their first release on their own label Loma Vista Recordings (and their first release with keyboardist Alex Fischel), Spoon seem to be indulging at times in a bit of an existential crisis.

If the album expresses fear of anything though, perhaps it’s the draining, vampiric passing of time. “Every day I hear knock knock knock, / and it’s you,” Daniel sings on “Knock Knock Knock,” and that “you” could easily be any number of things, any number of cares and responsibilities insistently pushing for attention. The album’s opener, a good, old-fashioned rock and roll song with bright, trebly guitars and pounding, punctuating drums, is titled “Rent I Pay.” “Out amongst the stars and stones / every kind of fortune gets old,” Daniel sings in his signature slightly raspy tenor. And then the following track, the spacey “Inside Out,” meditates on a similar theme: amid light synths and cascading keys trickling down like celestial harps, he repeats, “Time keeps on going when we got nothing else to give.”

Spoon have already given a lot—their last few albums, like 2006’s Gimme Fiction and 2010’s Transference, both did well commercially, and the band’s music has been featured on countless television shows and movies. After Transference, the band took a few years to recoup and work on other projects, like Daniel’s side project Divine Fits or multi-instrumentalist Eric Harvey’s solo album. So the Spoon of They Want My Soul are, maybe, a Spoon with a new set of concerns and a somewhat new aesthetic to match. “Inside Out,” “Outlier” and “New York Kiss” make use of layered synths and keys in contrast to the band’s older, more minimalistic material, and “I Just Don’t Understand” veers toward the blues, with a shuffling beat and brooding, grooving keys. “Let Me Be Mine” mixes elements of both of these directions, airy synths and ringing keys.

But other tracks, like “Rent I Pay” and the title track, still sound more like the Spoon we know from years past. It’s not clear what direction Spoon plan to take, but whichever way they go, it’s probably going to be good.