second fav by them behind kill the moonlight.

Top notch songwriting with organic production and that Spoon nuance? Of course it's their best album, and one of my all time favorites.

a cross between crowded house and cake?

the pinnacle album in spoons discography

I think this is the band hitting a peak and it is the horns that separate this from the rest of their catchy funk rock. Don't You Evah, Rhtm and Soul and Underdog are all songs I could probably listen to every day. Seriously good music.

Maybe it's the addition of the horn sections, but almost all songs on this album sound so damn funky. They're still proponents of the 3-minute-ish, concise indie-pop-rock song. There's some air of danger ("Clubs and sticks and bats and balls / For nuclear dicks with their dialect drawls") with opener "don't make me a target" and it's cameo clanging guitar and its extended bridge with play-along-at-home hand claps. Love the horns and cymbals in "you got yr. cherry bomb" and its perpetual drumming motion and cooing vocals near the end. Love the horns and melody of "the underdog" and its built-up ending, with snappy lyrics like "You got no time for the messenger, / got no regard for the thing that you don't understand. / You got no fear of The Underdog, / that's why you will not survive.". The guitar-work in "don't you evah" is funky and the background faint vocal plays are fun. You'll find yourself singing along to the chorus of "finer feelings". The only track that doesn't fully-sit well is the echoey, piano-monotoned lead single "the ghost of you still lingers". I like the song, but i probably missed the point of the vocal and other FX and it feels like a run-on sentence with no chorus and that piano. But that's a minor quibble -- i'm still ga ga over ga ga ga ga ga. These guys sound cooler than that Michael J Fox character tried to sound at the end of Back to the Future. See "eddie's ragga" and its groovy bass. See the acoustic guitar and rawk attitude in "japanese cigarette case". Or maybe they're the indie version of prime huey lewis & the news crossed with early inxs (and a pinch of the clash) on this album. (i'm sure the indie kids love that analogy.) Whatever the magic behind GA5, this is the culmination of spoon's talent.

One of the year's best. At their height, Spoon presents Freshness along great creativity which has resulted plenty of great songs.