Why is Spoon’s Gimme Fiction on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
Yeah, you got the weight of the world coming down like a mother’s eye.
Some stats & info about Spoon – Gimme Fiction
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Alternative Rock, Indie Rock
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4 out of 5 stars
- When was Gimme Fiction released? 2005
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #652 out of 1,000
Spoon’s Gimme Fiction on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does Spoon’s Gimme Fiction mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
To go a bit behind the scenes on the process of producing (crafting? sculpting?) the best 1,000 albums ever, it started with going through thousands of albums. It was really fun, really interesting, and really pain staking. I spent over six months just doing this. Well, I also did life stuff, and job stuff, and occasionally watched TV shows like Succession or Below Deck: Med. But you get the gist.
At a certain point, I finally had a rough idea of what the “best 1,000 albums” would be and I had a very rough idea of what the actual order would be. From there, I went back through all of those albums not once but multiple times. Well over 100 albums shuffled in and out of being considered for the top 1,000 at all. Some albums that I thought might go “fairly high” completely soured on subsequent review sessions. And I honestly struggled with questions like, “Is this an album that I actually want on my best 1,000 albums, or is it an album that I think should go on a Top 1,000 albums list?”
Crazy, I know. Super geeky. But you know, fun. Also: a passion project during the earliest and most confining months of the pandemic. So sue me, right?
Anyway, I mention all of this here because there were some albums that every time I went back to it, it just got better and better. The songs that I already liked a lot I liked even more. Deeper cuts that weren’t really on my radar suddenly were on my radar and I was like, “Whoah, this song is really good too, what?” And so on. This represents my actual unvarnished thought process, by the way, as hilarious as that seems. To me, anyway!
And as you might have guessed, Spoon’s Gimme Fiction happens to be one of those albums.
“The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine” is a great example of a song that wasn’t fully on my radar until I dove deeper into the best 1,000 albums ever project. And it’s just flat out fantastic, produced in a way that only Spoon can. In some ways it’s a straight forward rocker, but it’s got a kind of indie credibility to it, and the string accompaniment adds a nice flavor of drama and gravity without coming off as pretentious or cheesy.
“I Turn My Camera On” is a song that I’ve long been familiar with, and it holds up well. The pulsing, driving bass line and relatively spare, precise production sets off Britt Daniel’s high register vocal delivery. It’s a groovy, driving rock song, the kind of thing we don’t get a lot of these days.
“I Summon You” might be my favorite song on Gimme Fiction. I’m a sucker for that strummy guitar sound matched with strong song writing and vocals. And like the entire album, its produced exceptionally well: every instrument, every sound comes across crisply and is arranged perfectly.