Squint with your Ears

From the NY Times' review of Spoon's new masterpiece, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga:

“Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga,” Spoon’s sixth album, is full of songs that seem to have been carefully, lovingly teased apart, leaving behind fragments. Some assembly is required: Listen long enough, squint with your ears, and you can hear it whole.

Later in the review, he describes Britt Daniels' singing voice:

He sounds like a British guy with a Southern accent and a cold, which means he sounds like a rock star, only more so.

The review is entertaining, but the record is sheer precision-tuned audio brilliance. And hey, it's on EMusic today, the very day it's released in record stores. Cheers for Merge Records!

(And a very gentle boo for New West Records. Jason Isbell's new solo album, Sirens of the Ditch, is out today, but it's not on EMusic yet. Hopefully it will be soon, although NWR seems a bit finicky about which records it chooses to give to EMusic.)