| · More shoe-gazing for folkies.
There may be no second acts in American lives, but English pop embraces them. The whole dance phenomenon of the ’90s was driven by half-forgotten pop stars of an earlier decade working in cautious pseudonymity. While their American counterparts’ illustrious careers can generally be summarized as finding a good idea and sticking with it to the end, in the U.K it’s more a matter of having as many ideas as possible, often regardless of quality or original ownership. Due to Brit- pop’s essential theatricality, each of these ideas tends to be played out in a separate presentation.
Neil Halstead made his first appearance on the artier (and tardier) side of the shoe-gazing circuit in the early ’90s, redefined himself as the folk-country Mojave 3 in the latter part of the decade, and recently had his finest moment under his own name, on last year’s Sleeping On Roads, where (confusingly) he played the part of Nick Drake.
That album’s success seems to have given him renewed confidence in a group setting. Spoon is masterful pulling together of all Halstead’s various influences and incarnations in a mellow English pastoral medley somewhere between Robert Wyatt, Drake, Mystery Tour-era Beatles and Slowdive themselves. The songwriting is panoramic in its scope – the nine-minute opener, with its carefully sequenced instrumental shifts, plays like a belated rejoinder to Spiritualized, and Halstead does a surprisingly good job of keeping things varied, given that bassist Rachel Goswell, whose vocals provided some of Mojave 3’s previous highpoints, hardly gets a word in here (solo album on the way).
Obviously, it’s not an innovative album, or any other sort of musical landmark, but it does provide a satisfactory climax to the second act of Halstead’s career and leaves us hoping for an equally radical and successful change of scene in the third.
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