A tight 13 tracks culled from 23 years of swaggering indie rock, Spoon’s first comp reaches as far back as 2001’s Girls Can Tell for the title track to Everything Hits at Once. Bookended by excellence, the LP opens with the sleepy-sultry hypnotics of “I Turn My Camera On,” frontman Britt Daniel’s voice slipping from falsetto to soulful rasp, and closes with sharp new track “No Bullets Spent.” Two of Spoon’s most beloved earworms anchor the middle – “The Way We Get By,” with its runaway piano, and “The Underdog,” cruising atop frenetic acoustic guitar, horns, and the hopefulness of a mid-Aughts indie anthem – but recent hit wannabe “Hot Thoughts” follows immediately and nearly neutralizes them. In that sense, The Best of Spoon feels like a misnomer title. Daniel recently told the Chronicle he intended the band’s new compilation for folks with a “passing familiarity” of the band, and that’s where it hits its mark. Here’s your gateway LP to Spoon, not a comprehensive overview.
This article appears in September 6 • 2019.