Wiki
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Release Date
1 January 2007
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Length
10 tracks
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the sixth studio album by Spoon. It was released on Merge Records on July 10, 2007. 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. By January 2010, the album had sold 318,000 copies in the United States. It was supported by two singles; "The Underdog" and "Don't You Evah".
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.The band changed the name to the song, 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.
"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. 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".
The track "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" was a song the band "really struggled with". 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. As the intro continued, Daniel began singing along with the guitar line, which can also be heard on the final mix.
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".
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.
The album appeared on several year-end and decade-end lists released by music publications. cokemachineglow rated it the best album of 2007. Pitchfork ranked it the 7th best album of 2007 and later ranked it the 35th best album of the decade. The album was at #10 on Rolling Stone's list of the Top 50 Albums of 2007. 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. Treble ranked it the 3rd best album of 2007 and the 31st best of the decade. Q and Glide also ranked it the 66th and 28th best albums of the decade respectively.
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