Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga GaMerge, 20077 stars out of 10Listen to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga on headphones and you'll have a grand ol' time with pretty much every song. This otherwise standard-solid indie rock record, not too unusually for the boys in Spoon, is laden with li'l tricks for the ear: “mistakes” and chatter left in, an odd effect choice or ten, general sounds and arrangement features from left field. (See “Stay Don't Go” from 2002's Kill the Moonlight for a previous dabbling in the aesthetic.) It's in the tradition of rock-that-likes-dub, which really has been around almost ever since dub itself. Of course you could go back farther for similar, pre-dub flights of mix trickery, but here it's pretty apparent that all the strife is to reach something like Jamaican cool without worrying about playing reggae. You might know what I'm talking about.Listen in a more distant environment and less of it is bound to catch your ear. After some thorough examinations, the clear melodic highlights are “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” and album climax “Finer Feelings,” although between the two, the mixtape selection is definitely “Cherry Bomb,” with a litany of successful elements packed into three good minutes: meaty saxophones, vibes, a hint of vocoder, that ubiquitous Spoon tambourine (ever notice that about them?), a nice beat-drop-out, a real hook, and Britt's vocals at their most charmingly mealy-mouthed – and best of all, a mix that allows you to appreciate the cleverness of all of it. For Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga's best triple-play, “Bomb” is bookended in the first half with “The Ghost of You Lingers” and “Don't You Evah,” two fairly entrancing songs for totally different reasons. An overly simplistic way to distinguish them is that “Ghost” does not have any drums or stringed instruments in it. Good. For Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga's least substantial fun, check out “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case.” It's a trifle, but the kind of trifle that good albums were made to sometimes have.I'm not quite as into the music on the other five. I'm not even going to talk about “The Underdog,” not that it's a bad song, but it wants so badly to be talked about with its horns and its Jon Brion production and I won't give it the pleasure. I sometimes just skip “Eddie's Ragga” (see what I mean?) and, more often, stop it before album-closing, Ringo-beat-aping, drama-wanna-be-having ballad “Black Like Me” (see what I mean?). I do, however, sometimes just start it again from the top instead; there's a cool distortion effect and some toy piano in the first song. Take it from me, who didn't even like Gimme Fiction; Spoon has made Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, a listenable, non-cloying, non-stale, kind of unpredictable, fun, unpretentious, and smart indie rock album (yes, even taken as a whole), in 2007. If the year continues as it has been, you won't hear me using most of those words together for a while now. Catch the fever!!-Spencer Owen