They Want My Soul
Spoon
Spoon’s eighth album, They Want My Soul, is a lush jangle of guitars, smart lyrics and catchy refrains that continues to set the band apart from, well, other bands you’re not quite sure you’ve heard of.
Therein lives the mystery of Spoon. They’re just good enough to make a 20-year career while producing music you’ve probably overlooked. That may not last much longer thanks to a couple of standout tracks that are certain to be late-summer earworms.
Do You is the one song you must know about. It asks of the listener “Do you want to get understood?/Do you want one thing or are you looking for sainthood?” It has a great pace and is delivered with matching emotion by the band’s electrifying lead singer Britt Daniel.
While Do You offers straight-ahead rock, Outlier has a more modern feel with its danceable backbeat and ghostly keyboard echoes.
Spoon can do a little bit of everything. To sound this fresh after two decades of work speaks to the band’s smartness and savvy. They were one of the crowd favorites during their set at the Shaky Knees Music Festival in Atlanta this year with an energetic stage presence.
Spoon is wearing its experience well these days.
— Ron Harris
Associated Press
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Rick Perlstein
Even Republicans piled on President Richard Nixon as the Watergate scandal wore on. But not California Gov. Ronald Reagan. He said Watergate was being “blown out of proportion” and was “none of my business.”
His point of view resonated with some. “There were two tribes in America now,” author Rick Perlstein writes. And Reagan spoke powerfully to one of those tribes, organizing around grievances like forced busing, feeling that the orderly America they loved was receding.
The Invisible Bridge is the story of “the right-wing insurgency bubbling barely beneath the surface” through the mid ’70s, and the national rise of the politician who benefited the most from it.
Perlstein gives the reader a sense of what average Americans took in during that turbulent period. Readers learn about phenomena like EST workshops, in which people paid $250 to have insults screamed at them. The account of John Dean’s Watergate testimony includes a snippet from the commercial aired during the hearing for Final Net (“So you finally got little Jamie married!”).
Reagan fans looking for a heroic tale will be disappointed. Perlstein’s default mode is irreverence, and his Reagan is a storyteller who does not let the messy complexity of reality get in the way of simple answers. Democrat Jimmy Carter fares no better.
At more than 800 pages, the narrative bogs down in places. But the mini-biography of Reagan is a page turner, as is Perlstein’s climactic account of the convention in 1976. Ford won the nomination but Reagan won the hearts of many Republicans who wondered if they had just picked the wrong candidate.
— Michael Hill
Associated Press
Long In The Tooth
Billy Joe Shaver
Old cowboys love to lament that contemporary country music’s in a sorry state and guilty of casting aside sage singers and songwriters — like Billy Joe Shaver. The crusty Texan trots out that trope at the start of his new album, and then spends the rest of the record showing he still has plenty to say.
Long in the Tooth covers a wide range of topics in 10 songs and 32 minutes. Shaver sings about politics, war, the lessons of Jesus and the Garden of Eden, and that’s just in the space of four verses on the tune The Git Go.
The title cut’s a hoot, with Shaver noting that as his 75th birthday approaches, “what I used to do all night, it takes me all night to do.” He sings about the rails on Sunbeam Special, then rails against America’s class divide on Checkers and Chess.
Best of all is I’m In Love, a ballad beautiful in its simplicity as Shaver pledges everlasting devotion. The song’s a testament to this cowboy’s staying power.
— Steven Wine
Associated Press