★★★
- Utilitarian: 👍🏻
- The Minor Tough: 🤷♂️
- Execution: 👍🏻
- Reservations: 🤷♂️
- 30 Gallon Tank: 👍🏻
- Car Radio: 👍🏻
- Metal Detektor: 🤷♂️
- June’s Foreign Spell: 🤷♂️
- Chloroform: 👎🏻
- Metal School: 🤷♂️
- Staring at the Board: 👎🏻
- No You’re Not: 🤷♂️
- Quincy Punk Episode: 👍🏻
- Advance Cassette: 👍🏻
- Laffitte Don’t Fail Me Now: 👍🏻
- The Agony of Laffitte: 👎🏻
When I set this goal for myself, I was not sure I’d even finish the first week. This is the 100th review for this site! If I had remembered that Saturday was supposed to be the 100th post I might have actually listened to something then. But I was with family all weekend for the Easter holiday, and we spent a ton of time working on a home improvement project that ended up eating a lot of time. Today is actually the 107th day of the year, so I have missed a full week’s worth of posts. But hitting 100 is a much bigger deal to me than missing those 7.
Anyway, I’ve been working my way backwards through Spoon’s discography. Unless I’ve forgotten about having heard Telephono (tomorrow’s album), A Series of Sneaks is the earliest Spoon album I’ve heard before. I know all the songs, but I didn’t realize until listening to this album all the way through today how much more it sounded like late punk than their later albums. Songs like 30 Gallon Tank and Car Radio are probably the best episodes of this. One thing that really struck me about this record over their others was the drumming. It sounded quite different, even from Girls Can Tell. I ended up looking at the band’s timeline of members and they’ve had the same drummer the whole time. I would have for sure guessed that they changed drummers between this album and their next. Somehow I completely failed to mention when I listened to Kill the Moonlight that The Way We Get By was the first song of theirs I heard, and it’s still my absolute favorite song by Spoon. But this album contains their song with the best title: Quincy Punk Episode.
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