I have to start this review with full disclosure: I'm a bit of a Spoon groupie.

I was 24 when I first found Spoon, after a friend loaned me A Series of Sneaks. I lived in San Antonio, seventy miles south of Austin, TX. As a result of the proximity, I've seen Spoon play live more times than any other band. I've, on numerous occasions, shamelessly tried to endear myself to Britt Daniel (to no avail.) You could say, then, that I'm the least qualified to provide a review of Spoon's seventh album, Transference. That I'm biased. But you wouldn't ask your mechanic about a pain in your abdomen, right? You'd go to an expert. And I've been studying this band intensely for eleven years.

Okay, maybe there's a little bias. When I found Spoon, I was in the right place to receive what they had to offer. I was an undergraduate in Art History, therefore quick to notice the Italian futurist artwork on the cover of Sneaks. Moreover, I was working on a huge thesis about Donald Judd — a minimalist. Spoon's bare-bones, aggressive sound became the soundtrack to late nights spent poured over slides of stark metal boxes glinting in the West Texas sun. Judd and his minimalist pals were an intellectual fraternity, and like them, Spoon's music was all boyish bravado and lean muscle.

But that's Sneaks. A few years later, we'd find Spoon stretching into more melodic, and at times even wistful, territory on Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight. (Did I mind? Not at all. I swooned harder.) 2005's Gimmie Fiction brought us "Sister Jack," a near-hit, were its radio friendliness not delightfully undermined by a fractured time-shift. With 2007's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the band reached a sort of melodic zenith, and rode those mariachi trumpets all the way to the top ten. But in all of this, echoes of a sparer Spoon — the band of Sneaks and earlier releases — persisted. (Think the hand claps of "They Never Got You" or the lone flamenco guitar that concludes "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case.")

So Spoon decide to self-produce with Transference, and what we find is that those moments weren't persistent ghosts, but the band's actual skeleton showing through. If you came to Spoon via Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, listen: you might not like Transference. This isn't just the long-buried bones of a band, it's a gift to die-hard fans who long for the muscle and swagger of early Spoon. If you're one of those fans, prepare to reap the rewards: a ballad stripped bare by her bachelors in "Goodnight, Laura," the shimmery reverb on "Who Makes Your Money," the stutter-step contratiempo of "Written in Reverse," the cocky punch of "Got Nuffin." The elements that make up these songs are familiar:  Daniel's cryptic lyricism and soulful yelping, spatterings of distortion and vocoder, the Spoon-typical push and pull of instrumentation. But it's solid stuff.

My favorite visual artists have always been those who take their work — not themselves — seriously. That's Spoon, too.  This is a band that plays friendly little pranks on its listeners, as if to shake you out of your minimalist reverie and remind you that it's just rock and roll, man. Remember the complete tease of Sneaks' "Car Radio?" How perfect, yet painfully short, that song was? Prepare to get punked again on Transference, when "The  Mystery Zone," hypnotizes you for four minutes and fifty-eight seconds and then ...

Related

• 'Transference' on Spotify