FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Rank Your Records: Spoon Bassist Rob Pope Ranks the Band's Eight Albums

Rob Pope, Spoon's bassist, puts down the Austin outfit's albums in order, and tells us what it's like to become a full time member of a band you used to be a fan of.

In Rank Your Records, we talk to members of bands who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference.

In December 2009, Metacritic celebrated ten years of aggregating reviews with a retrospective, looking back at the best music of the decade, from 2000 to 2009. The website decided to highlight the overall top artists of those ten years by picking the bands who met the following criteria: (1) they had released at least three albums from 2000-09; (2) at least two of those albums had to be “great” (with a metascore of 81 or higher); and (3) the average metascore for all of their releases from that decade also had to be 81 or higher.

Advertisement

The band that topped the Best Artists of The Decade list was Spoon. The Austin, Texas outfit had released four albums in that timeframe, so they definitely weren't the most prolific band of the decade, but—as per Metacritic's staff mentioned—they were the most consistently great, collecting standing ovations, cheers, and shouts from the music press and rock fans looking for music made with impeccable lyrics and addictive songs, authentic earworms skilled in the art of digging through our brains and having our eardrums as their beds.

As their fans keep claiming that Britt Daniel has never written a bad song and Spoon keep doing some festival appearances across the world, we sat down with Rob Pope to ask him what it’s like to be the bassist of a band you were a fan before becoming a full time member, and to talk about his own personal ranking of the band’s catalogue.

8. TELEPHONO (1996)

NOISEY: Why did you choose this one as your least favorite release?
Rob Pope: After I was listening to Girls Can Tell, I went back and listened to the first two. A good friend of mine loved this record, so he would play it all the time. He and I worked together. We were screen printers. So he listened to this record all the time and I was like ‘this is Spoon? What?’ Now it sounds like Spoon to me, but at the time I was like ‘that doesn’t even sound like them’, cause it’s so different… You know, it’s like this stuff kind of turned more into like soul and there are some R’n’B influences, but it's still also kind of punk rock.

Advertisement

After that first album, there's an EP that Britt used to mention as one of the band’s best releases.
Yeah! Soft Effects. That’s when they started to use the studio as an instrument. You know, like really taking advantage of reverbs and cool sounds. And Telephone sounds very raw, sounds like a first record, but in a great way.

7. A SERIES OF SNEAKS (1998)

The second record is the acid test for a lot of bands.
Yes, and A Series of Sneaks is kind of the black sheep of the band. [Laughs]

Why?
Well, between Telephone and A Series of Sneaks, they signed to a major label. This record came out and immediately dropped. Until Girls Can Tell came out, no one was listening to A Series of Sneaks. It’s a great record too, with very cool post-punk rock. It has very good songs.

6. GIMME FICTION (2005)

What’s wrong with this one?
Gimme Fiction is a solid record. It has some elements that I really love… Kind of bluesy, really tough sounding, rough edges. That one was great too.

When you knew that you were going to be part of the band, did you start to study the songs of the previous records?
Yeah, yeah. When I joined the band, they were still kind of touring on this record. So, when I met with them and we talked about practicing or something, I had to learn this record front to back. When I sat down to join the band and like learn all the songs on bass, I went through this record first, and that was cool.

Advertisement

Tell me about the challenges when you started to play with a band that you had admired beforehand.
Mainly just trying to match sounds from records and make sure the bass sounded really nice, and practicing with Jim (Eno, drums), because he and I like to communicate a lot about what the rhythm section is doing, make sure that it sounds really tight and tough when it needs to be.

5. KILL THE MOONLIGHT (2002)

What happened when this record came out?
I was a big fan since Girls Can Tell, so when Kill The Moonlight came out to me it felt like a great continuation, but it was even kind of smarter, the sounds were kind of cooler, like suddenly there was a David Bowie influence or something. I was playing in another band (The Get Up Kids) and we listened to this in the van all the time while driving on our tour.

4. GIRLS CAN TELL (2001)

You told me that you started to be a fan of the band with this record.
Yeah, I knew the band in the 90s and I saw them play a bunch of times, but when Girls Can Tell came out, that was the first record that I bought and I really listened to it all the time. I really loved that record. It had a very cool sound, big drums and really smart songwriting. And Britt… It was the first time when I was like ‘Wow, that guy has a great voice’. That was the first Spoon record I bought.

Many people have that record as their favorite. Why do you think that is?
The first two records, not many people heard them. When this record came out, that's when people I think really started to talk about the band. When people finally start to take notice and start to talk about a band, a lot of people will lodge under that record, and that will be their favorite forever, so…

Advertisement

3. GA GA GA GA GA (2007)

Why is Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga at number three?
This record I love because it was the first record that I played on in the band. When I joined the band we were working on all the songs for this record, it was kind of my introduction to the band.

And this record did really, really well.
Yes, especially in America. There are some very catchy songs on this record. The band had been kind of building up and building up with Gimme Fiction. And I think it was just good timing. When the record came out in America, people loved it.

2. THEY WANT MY SOUL (2014)

Let me guess… This one you like because it’s the most recent you've published.
Yeah, and I think front to back it's just really great songs. We had a great time working on it with Dave Fridmann. The man behind some of Mercury Rev's and Flaming Lips' psychedelic masterpieces…
Yes. Himself.

I had the feeling of listening to a more luminous album, with brighter songs.
Yeah, we wanted to make it a little more fun, maybe a little more aggressive, but also still very catchy.

Does that have to do with the period between 2011 and 2013 when you decided to take a break?
We had a long time to think. And we talked a lot along the process. There's a song, ‘Inside Out’, that's very representative about that. I feel that we talked about of that one more than about any other song. We talked about all the different elements. We wanted it to sound like Spoon, but we also wanted it to sound like a Dr. Dre song, or like a hip-hop song.

Advertisement

1. TRANSFERENCE (2010)

Frequently, musicians say that their last record is their favorite. Why did you choose the previous one?
Personally, I really like it because it’s kind of like a loner record, like a good headphone record. It’s not really a party record. You want to listen to it by yourself, seated in a corner, in a dark room, to lose yourself a little bit. For some reason, a lot of people didn’t like this record, but it's my favorite.

Why do you love it so much?
Because it has a lot of home recordings, a lot of first takes, a lot of happy accidents… Things that don’t happen on big records that are very produced. We wanted to leave it very raw, almost kind of ugly.

In Spanish, Jesús Pacheco means Stoned Jesus. Just for having such a great birth name, you should follow him on Twitter.