Spoon Lucifer on the Sofa Review: A Back-to-Basics Retread

Spoon’s Lucifer on the Sofa kicks off with a measured yet swaggering cover of Bill Callahan’s “Held,” that represents a sort of misdirect. Whereas the Smog singer-songwriter’s music can be opaque and spacey, Spoon’s 10th studio album positions itself as a back-to-basics collection of rugged, straightforward rock. The band adds braided spikes of guitar notes and low piano runs to Callahan’s fiddle-driven oddity, but much of the rest of Lucifer on the Sofa feels like a retread of their usual jams filled with staccato guitar-playing.

Sustained, mournful horns imbue the title track with the kind of rich texture and warm ambiance that we’ve come to expect from frontman Britt Daniel, drummer Jim Eno, and their ever-rotating cast of bandmates. And the propulsive guitars on the Kinks-indebted rockers “The Hardest Cut” and “Wild” effectively echo the aching pangs of passion expressed in the songs’ lyrics. But too much of the guitar work on Lucifer on the Sofa feels programmatic.

Elsewhere, the spare, single-note acoustic picking on the lyrically sweet “My Babe” is overpowered by heavy power chords, coming off rote when it should be spry. And the overlapping and interlocking electric guitars on songs like “Feels Alright” and “Satellite” lack the friction created by the juxtaposition of dissonant and melodic sounds that has previously enlivened albums like 2002’s Kill the Moonlight and 2014’s They Want My Soul.

Daniel’s vocal on the lovely “Astral Jacket”—especially when he sings the line “in the blink of an eye”—boasts the winking knowingness, with a hint of angst, that defines his best work. But while most singers gain vocal character over time, Daniel’s voice, which has been beautifully strained and uniquely ragged for 20-plus years, sounds largely smoothed over here. This is especially true of his rather nondescript delivery on the otherwise stirring title track.

There’s an intelligence and sneakiness to the way that lines are repeated but slightly tweaked on songs like “The Hardest Cut.” But there are also frequent lyrical moments here that are too broad or downright nonsensical: Lines such as “Street dreaming/Tell you what it’s meaning” on “Feels Alright” are emblematic of the album’s overly broad lyricism.

After decades of consistent, scrappy indie rock that both maintained a high bar of quality and found them trying at least one or two new things per album, Spoon has hit something of a dead end with Lucifer on the Sofa. The album gestures toward breaking free of old habits, but it doesn’t present any new ones, musically or otherwise.