Spoon: Hot Thoughts review – indie experimenters dance the night away

Spoon have released nine albums since the early 1990s, the last three reaching the US Top 10. So they have nothing to prove, but you wouldn’t know that from the 10 songs here: Hot Thoughts is loaded with tunes, invention and adventure. Take the title track. Its arrangement never sits still – elements of post-punk jerkiness and dub appear and then are gone – but at its core is a descending-chord motif that is pure simplicity. Do I Have to Talk You Into It is a great rock song, but Spoon weave in electronica, disco and garage rock to lift it into another league. Britt Daniel’s searing voice has an elemental rock’n’roll feel, like John Lennon’s or Kurt Cobain’s, and the whole album is expertly conceived and put together. Halfway through, it takes a sharp left turn with Pink Up, on which vibraphone and maracas coax us into a backwards-vocal-and-strings dreamscape. Finally, haunting closer Us leaves us alone with saxophones, the band only kicking in at the fade-out.