Spoon, for all intents and purposes, is Britt Daniel. He writes and sings, he plays guitar (acoustic and electric), bass, piano and other keyboards, various bits of percussion, and, according to the liner notes, he also plays yamonica and memory man. Jim Eno plays drums throughout, producer Mike McCarthy throws in a few finger snaps and, uh, flams, and various guests (including John Vanderslice) do various other things, but it’s mostly Daniel’s gig.

Now, in my experience with a lot of these one-man (or one-man-and-a-couple-of-friends) bands is that they usually throw just about everything they can at a song, I guess in an attempt to compensate for the lack of personnel. With Daniel at the helm, though, it’s “anything you can do, I can do less of”. None of his arrangements here are one iota bigger than they need to be. There’s just enough to carry the idea and not a bit more.

Take, for example, the third cut on the album. “I Turn My Camera On” consists of the simplest of basslines, barebones drumming, a bit of scratch guitar, Daniel’s falsetto vocal, and a couple of tiny keyboard effects that, when they actually appear, take on the significance of, I dunno, Sherman sweeping through Georgia. Much bigger than they are, anyway. Most indie bands attempting to simulate funk would be piling squiggly keyboard figures on top of each other, and a very busy bass atop that. Daniel gives you just enough to suggest the direction the song is taking and lets you fill in whatever else you want to yourself.

And so it goes, on the more funk-based songs (“I Turn My Camera On”, the percussion-and-keyboard-weirdness enhanced bass groove of “Was It You?”, the Motown-derived “They Never Got You”) as well as the more straightforward indie rock pieces, i.e., everything else. Speaking personally, I prefer Spoon’s piano driven tunes to those propelled by guitar. Not that the guitar work is lacking, by any means; Daniel provides interesting six-string textures throughout, specifically on “The Delicate Place” and the underwater solo on “Sister Jack”. The thing is, I listen to a lot of guitar-based music and, while I’m certainly not sick of it, it’s nice to hear a bit of a change, y’know? Besides, the piano is where that minimalism I was talking about earlier really takes center stage. The descending chords ‘o’ doom of “The Beast and Dragon, Adored”; the repeated, hypnotic figure of “My Mathematical Mind”; the spooky keyboards (piano, fuzz rhodes, organ) on “The Infinite Pet”; the slightly busier, percussive piano workout of “Merchants of Soul” – these are what make this album stand out from the stack of CD’s I have waiting to be reviewed.

Lyrically, very little is straightforward. Makes a nice contrast to the arrangements, actually. And sometimes impressionistic lyrics are best, ‘cause you can read just about whatever you want into them. It gives the listener a sense of proprietary interest. (I just made that up, but who knows?) Here’s one of the more obscure lines: “I turn my camera on / I cut my fingers on the way / The way I’m slippin’ away / I turn my feelings off / Y’made me untouchable for life /and you wasn’t polite”. Well, it establishes a mood, certainly, and I’d guess it means something specific to its author, but I’m not sure I could tell you what it was. Getting hung up in lyrical analysis, while occasionally fun, isn’t going to get us very far in this instance. They sound good and right within the context of the songs, and that’s sufficient for me.

(Besides, as several other reviewers before me have pointed out, Daniel’s “uh-huh, alright” interjections are really what make the songs work. That’s gonna look kinda goofy on your screen, I realize, but when you listen to the album you’ll see that we are right. We’re back to that minimalism thing again.)

I was talking with a musician friend of mine, a couple of years ago, about improvisation. I asked him how he knew what to play when he was soloing; he said something to the effect of, “It’s more knowing what not to play.” Which sounds all zen and such, yeah, but I think he was on to something. Gimme Fiction certainly seems to bear him out, anyway.

(Spoon’s Gimme Fiction is available from Merge Records.)