Merge Records
1998
A Series Of Sneaks
About This Album
With A Series of Sneaks, Spoon became one of the unsung heroes of the guitar-driven post-punk tradition inhabited by bands such as Wire, Gang of Four, Hüsker Dü, and the Pixies. These were the guitar wizards who could package a variety of taut, terse, and inventive guitar sounds and unpredictable melodies into short, tight bursts one could still consider pop songs. Lead singer and guitarist Britt Daniel acts as the overachieving honors student of this tradition, flushing the spaces in between with an expansive melodic vocabulary comparable to Robert Pollard's.

But Sneaks wouldn't work if it were merely a repository of all the right influences. Thanks to John Croslin and the band's detailed production, shards of jagged guitar lines chime in from every direction, creating a language that blends with Daniel's charismatic vocal licks to form something so tuneful and compelling that the majority of Sneaks sticks in the brain just when you've thought you'd heard it all before. Daniel's voice can range from a throaty rasp to a falsetto to a spoken growl, peppered with some "bop-bop-bops," "c'mon's," and hand clapping. It's as if Jonathan Richman had been on SST Records, or even the old Sub Pop.
Track List (try tracks 2,3,6,8 and 10)

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