Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Whether Spoon is the greatest American band of the new millennium, as some critics have bloviated, is an argument for someone more knowledgeable of such things than me. But I'd have to believe you'd be hard pressed to find another band that's been this consistently good for this long. Six albums in and they have yet to put out an album that doesn't pay both immediate and long-lasting dividends on your investment. Over the last year, many of my favorite contemporary bands have put out stuff that has left me unimpressed (notably the Arcade Fire's ponderous new effort), but it's good to know you can still pencil in Spoon on your day-of-release purchase list without worry.

Spoon is oft-praised -- and rightly so -- for its economy, a quality on full display here. One of my criticisms of a lot of new albums is that they just...keep...going, long after the artist(s) ran out of good ideas. Just because you can fit 80 minutes of music on a CD doesn't mean you should. Britt Daniel and company draw from a varied musical palette, but never at the price of showing off. At 10 songs and 36 minutes, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, clunky title and all, gets in and gets out.

As for the songs, many of them are vintage Spoon, but they still find room to surprise: "The Ghost of You Lingers" is goosebump-inducing in its stark repetitiveness (you keep waiting for the full band to kick in -- in fact, the rules of pop music demand it kicks in -- but it doesn't, making the song even more haunting). Its follow-up, "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb," with its celebratory Motown shuffle, reveals a sound I'm not sure we've heard from the four-piece before.

I could pull out the thesaurus to come up with a ten-dollar adjective to describe this singular group, but I'll just fall back on an old favorite, a little outdated perhaps but still on-point: This band is awesome.