Spoon: "Do You"

“Do you wanna get understood?” Britt Daniel sings on the chorus of “Do You”, savoring those deep vowel sounds on the title phrase. “Do you run when it’s just getting good?” Especially coming four years after Transference, a ho-hum record that broke their streak of excellent albums during the 2000s, it’s reassuring to hear Spoon in classic Spoon mode. “Do You” is not just a strong Spoon song, but one that can stand alongside “I Turn My Camera On” or “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” or “June’s Foreign Spell” or whichever is your favorite. Borrowing from the band’s past to show us something new, it marries the rhythmic thrust of, say, Girls Can Tell with the production nuance of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The result is somehow both tense and sunny, heavy and light. If, as Eliza Berman at Slate has suggested, the song is a late entry in the summer jam sweepstakes, it’s better suited to the buggy days of August than the heyday of July: “Someone get popsicles, someone do something ‘bout this heat.” Ultimately, “Do You” sounds like a song about marking transitions: summer into autumn, the 2000s into the 2010s, Merge to Loma Vista, bouncy doo-doo-doo’s on the bridge to soulful mmm-mmm-mmm’s on the coda. 

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