Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the sixth studio album by American rock band Spoon. It was first released on July 10, 2007, through Merge Records and Anti-. It received critical acclaim and appeared on several year-end album lists. The album debuted at number 10 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and at number 1 on the Billboard Top Independent Albums, selling 46,000 copies in its first week.[1] By January 2010, the album had sold 318,000 copies in the United States.[2] It was supported by two singles; "The Underdog" and "Don't You Evah".
Production
"Don't Make Me a Target" was originally written by Daniel while Spoon was producing its previous album, Gimme Fiction. The band practiced it "quite a bit" before the release of Gimme Fiction, but ended up shelving it for a year after unsuccessful attempts to work out an arrangement they liked.[3] When it was recorded a year later, the drum part was recorded without tom-toms the first time. Drummer Jim Eno then recorded the tom-toms separately with a drastically different microphone arrangement. This gave them a much more reverb-laden sound, as if "in a tunnel".[3]
The track "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" was a song the band "really struggled with".[3] This led them to record it three different ways, including a "space rock" version found on the bonus disc and heard distantly at the end of the album arrangement.
At the beginning of "Don't You Evah", Daniel can be heard repeatedly asking "Jim, can you record the talkback?". According to Daniel, he was asking Jim Eno to record the talkback microphone that was being manned by producer Mike McCarthy to a separate track. McCarthy would make comments to Daniel over the talkback microphone at the studio desk as Daniel was singing, and Daniel and Eno considered McCarthy's comments to be ridiculous.[3] As the intro continued, Daniel began singing along with the guitar line, which can also be heard on the final mix.[3]
The vinyl version has no run-out groove on side two. Instead, it ends on a continuous loop of music that appears after the end of the song "Black Like Me".
Packaging and release
The album's title is the former title for the song "The Ghost of You Lingers", which was meant to sound like the song's staccato piano part.[4] The band changed the song's title, but decided to adopt the name "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" as the album title, with Britt Daniel calling it a "great little Dadaist term".[4] Its cover art comes from a portrait of the artist and sculptor Lee Bontecou, taken by the Italian photographer Ugo Mulas in 1963.[5] The completed sculpture on the right is now in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art.[6]
An iTunes-exclusive bonus track, "Deep Clean", was packaged with Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. A limited edition copy of the album was released along with a bonus disc entitled Get Nice! The disc includes 23 minutes of mostly instrumental songs and a few demo tracks. Early buyers of the album also received a free 7" containing a demo of "The Underdog", and the B-side "It Took a Rumor to Make Me Wonder, Now I'm Convinced I'm Going Under", which had previously appeared on the UK edition of the "Sister Jack" single.[citation needed]
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga received critical acclaim from music critics.[7] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 84 based on 33 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[7] In a review for Entertainment Weekly, Sean Howe complimented the "inventory of sounds" on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, calling it "one of those 'taking stock' records that refines and collates everything that came before".[10]PopMatters' Zeth Lundy cited the album as the band's "most groove-oriented effort", thanks in part to the addition of Eric Harvey and Rob Pope to the band's recording line-up, and concluded by writing that "there's plenty on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga to suggest that the band harbors its most intimate operational relationships outside the norm."[18] Heather Phares of AllMusic praised its "remarkable blend of focus and creativity" and noted that "even if Spoon's modus operandi seems overly regimented on paper, the results are just as elegant as they are fun."[8] Giving it a "Best New Music" designation, Eric Harvey of Pitchfork called the album a "wonderfully singular indie rock record".[13]
The album appeared on several year-end and decade-end lists released by music publications. cokemachineglow rated it the best album of 2007.[19]Pitchfork ranked it the 7th best album of 2007[20] and later ranked it the 35th best album of the decade.[21] The album was at #10 on Rolling Stone's list of the Top 50 Albums of 2007.[22]Delusions of Adequacy rated it the 2nd best album of 2007 and the 43rd best of the decade. Tiny Mix Tapes ranked it the 9th best of the year.[23]Treble ranked it the 3rd best album of 2007[24] and the 31st best of the decade.[25]Q and Glide also ranked it the 66th and 28th best albums of the decade respectively.
Track listing
All songs produced by Britt Daniel, Jim Eno and Mike McCarthy, and engineered by Jim Eno and Mike McCarthy, except "The Underdog", produced by Jon Brion and Spoon, and engineered by Greg Koller.
All tracks are written by Britt Daniel, except where noted
"I Summon You (Cool)" (from the Get Nice! bonus EP)
1:28
12.
"You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb (Garage Reverb)" (from the Get Nice! bonus EP)
3:13
Get Nice!
The first pressing of the Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga CD release included the bonus EP Get Nice!, which contains alternative versions of "I Summon You" (from the previous album Gimme Fiction) and "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb". It also includes many previously unreleased instrumental tracks.[26]
No.
Title
Length
1.
"I Got Mine"
2:34
2.
"Be Still My Servant"
1:24
3.
"Leave Your Effects Where They're Easily Seen"
0:56
4.
"I Summon You (Cool)"
1:28
5.
"Mean Mad Margaret"
1:37
6.
"Love Makes You Feel"
2:38
7.
"You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb (Garage Reverb)"
3:13
8.
"Tasty Fish"
1:18
9.
"Dracula's Cigarette"
1:24
10.
"1975"
1:39
11.
"I Can Feel It Fade Like an AM Single"
3:12
12.
"Curfew Tolls"
1:33
Total length:
23:03
Bonus 7-inch single
Pre-orders for the vinyl release of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga included a 7" vinyl single with a demo version of "The Underdog". The B-side of the single is "It Took A Rumor To Make Me Wonder, Now I'm Convinced I'm Going Under" a song which has been previously released under the name "It Took A Rumor To Make Me Wonder Now I'm Afraid I'm Going Under" on the UK release of "Sister Jack".
No.
Title
Length
1.
"The Underdog (demo)"
3:12
2.
"It Took A Rumor To Make Me Wonder, Now I'm Convinced I'm Going Under" (from the "Sister Jack" UK release)
"Finer Feelings" uses a sample from the song "Industrial Spy" by the Jamaican reggae artist Mikey Dread. The song was written by Micheal G. Campbell and can be found on Dread's 1979 album African Anthem.
"Don't You Evah" in part of the soundtrack of Hulu miniseries 11.22.63, episode "The Rabbit Hole".
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga debuted at number 10 on the Billboard 200 at 46,000 copies sold. In week 2, it fell to 35 with 19,000, then 55 with 12,000 on August 1, 2007. In week 4, it fell to number 58, selling 11,000—a total of 88,000 copies in 4 weeks.
^"Top 50 Albums of 2007". treblezine.com. Treblezine. December 17, 2007. Archived from the original on August 20, 2015. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
^"The Best Albums of the '00s". treblezine.com. Treblezine. January 18, 2010. Archived from the original on August 21, 2014. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
^On February 25, 2005, The Natural History performed "Don't You Ever" at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey. The concert can be found hereArchived October 30, 2007, at the Wayback Machine at eMusic; Please note that eMusic has mislabeled "Don't You Ever" as "Princeton Junction".
