Spoon Gets Thorny

American indie rockers Spoon hit Godhead status with Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga in 2007, a record that defied gravity by improving on an already amazing run of albums. For some, seventh and newest release Transference might be the first air pocket the band has hit in its long, dizzying climb.

Not so -- Transference is simply Spoon in deconstruct mode. Which is probably the only classy thing the band could have done after the impermeable songwriting, arrangements and production of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. (Also classy: streaming the whole thing here.)

On opening track "Before Destruction," which covers its first two verses before shifting guitarist-vocalist Britt Daniels' voice from the distance into the foreground, it sounds as if the band is literally pulling focus on a part of itself nobody noticed before. Spoon might also be signaling that Transference is more about the journey than the destination, since "Before Destruction" resolutely avoids resolving into a chorus let alone anything else.

It also establishes a low-frequency cut-up strategy that appears here and there across the record. Jittery electronics bubble up towards the end, and voices fly in and out of the frame, articulating nothing, but blooming into fractal sound cathedrals. Much of Transference defies reading but it does deserve close listening. To put it in classic headspeak -- it's a headphone album, full of sonic adventures and curious and wild touches. Your attention is easily rewarded.

"Is Love Forever" comes in on a more familiar Spoon template of downstroked guitar and a band-wide commitment to hammering the song's rhythm into the ground, and you can picture Daniel robotically windmilling like it's 1981 again. It reminds me of this lost masterpiece of quasi-Marxist, London bedsit post-funk. But that's me. In any event, Spoon spends two minutes vamping all over the track's monumentally simple chord pattern, while Daniel toys with the phrase "Are you quite certain, love?" and stabs at the effects board -- all of which leaves the listener certain of nothing, aside from the ongoing pleasure we take from pure sound manipulation.

It also makes for a great palette cleanser before "The Mystery Zone," an album highlight that has cavernous guitar pushing in one direction and bass implacably pushing in another. Again, Spoon lets the groove do most of the talking. If there's a theme to Transference, it might be the contradiction of super-attenuated songs that also happen to be quite brief. There are choruses in the just-under five minute "The Mystery Zone," but it feels like miles stretch between them. Perhaps this is Spoon's way of grappling with Zeno's Arrow Paradox. Feel free to comment if you have a better theory, stoners.

In "Who Makes Your Money," a placid synth figure left over from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is forced to room with Rob Pope's St. Vitus Dance-stricken bass, and Daniel once again puts his voice in the blender. Eventually, the title phrase is so mangled that you wonder if he's asking, "who makes you mine?" Absent any concrete meaning, you can at least extract something caustic from the ambiguity, while a more explicit universe of discontent seems to emerge from the smashy-smashy piano parts of "Written In Reverse" -- a song that gradually clads itself in discordant, murmuring guitar and bass and ever-more uppity drum patterns before a thrilling, breakaway climax. Daniel is utterly on fire here, finally opening the throttle on that voice of his as he screams, "I'm not standing here!" And who can blame him?

"I Saw the Light" is another feint; the first half is a Velvet Undergound-goes-radioactive country and western song-sketch, the other half is a descending chord pattern on two-minute repeat, like it was ripped from "She’s So Heavy" by grouchy Texan minimalists from the future. And it works as beautifully as anything on an album that challenges us, but not too much.

Even when Spoon is being as willfully perverse as this, its native pleasures are indestructible. The band can wring melody out of a two-chord construct, or -- in observance of Mr. Eno's Oblique Strategies -- turn repetition into change. In the same spirit, Spoon might choose to present "Trouble Comes Running" in its mono-fabulous demo form, but the garage-pop awesomeness of the song itself could withstand any kind of assault -- even if you tortured it on the rack and brutalized it with illegal dentistry. Which is kind of what happens on a lot of Transference. And it's way more fun than you might think.