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The Spoils (U.S.S.A. album)

album by U.S.S.A.

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 4, 2023
Entity authorityQ7765981 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Spoils is the debut studio album by American band U.S.S.A. It was written and produced by Paul Barker and Duane Denison.

Track listing

"Dead Voices" (4:26)

"Autumn Flowers" (4:11)

"Blue Light" (4:22)

"Cruel Beauty" (2:03)

"Middletown" (4:36)

"Summer Endless Summer" (5:04)

"Forget Yourself" (3:25)

"Cab Ride" (4:34)

"Peculiar Thing" (6:04)

"Sugarwater" (4:38)

"Wasteland" (5:31)

Reception

Ben Lasman of CMJ New Music Monthly, in a negative review, wrote that the album "plays like a cleaned-up retrospective of modern rock cliches flooded with misguided cock-rock swagger". Comparing its sound to Faith No More, Stephen Seigel of Tucson Weekly called The Spoils less dissonant than expected but "no less thrilling for the lack of it". Writing in Boise Weekly, Brandon Nolta called it "edgy, sometimes creepy and never less than entertaining", though it may not appeal to fans of its members' former bands. Greg Prato of AllMusic described it as "both arty and exploratory" without being snobbish. Prato compared the sound to first generation post-punk bands, including Barker's own The Blackouts.

References

External links

U.S.S.A. at MySpace

U.S.S.A. at Fuzz Artists, Inc.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Spoils (U.S.S.A. album)” is album by U.S.S.A. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Spoils and album, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current 180-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2006. For this dossier, Spoils and album is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “album by U.S.S.A” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q7765981. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “The Spoils (U.S.S.A. album)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow The Spoils (U.S.S.A. album) primary sources, The Spoils (U.S.S.A. album) archive and Spoils research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Spoils (U.S.S.A. album)”?
  2. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “The Spoils (U.S.S.A. album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.