Spoon, & cetera.

Spoon
Deerhunter

Micachu and the Shapes

The Fox Theater

Oakland, CA

April 14, 2010

Again I missed the first band, I’m sorry you (well, I) can’t have everything. So, Deerhunter & Spoon: is that like the dream team or what?

Anyway, I’ll be brief.

Most people are too polite to come right out & ask the question pointedly, but I can still read the thought bubbles floating over their heads. They wonder if, perhaps, I am starting to get a little too old for all of this going out to see bands at all hours of the night. & the succinct & appropriate response to that query, unspoken or otherwise, of course is Fuck No I Am Not. I will allow, however, that this whole getting up & going to work the next day is beginning to, uh, present some challenges. Moreover, the (hopefully prompt) writing of the Very Important blog entries is supposed to occur when exactly (?) well, There as they say is where the Rub is at. So brevity, yes, will turn out to be a hallmark of this post. The day's hours are finite.


Deerhunter: that’s just my favorite band all over again because (as one would hope) they came out & built up a Stonehenge fucking Monument of guitar distortion. I had never seen them play live before, & so it was a real treat to see the ensemble in action. I had seen Atlas Sound a couple of times, but Deerhunter is a real band it’s not just the Bradford Cox show (in spite of Mr. C.’s little crowd-surfing expedition toward the end; I never expected that). Every member is integral, musically speaking, & it’s all the goods. One nice surprise was bass player Josh Fauver at center stage, all earnest & spunky & bowing after every song. Whatta hunk I’m just saying. & “Nothing Ever Happened” did actually happen, thrillingly, for about fifteen minutes in the middle of the one-hour set. So Deerhunter was pretty great.

Of course it really was Spoon’s audience there, though, & I did overhear some sporadic audience griping between sets about DH's set having gotten too “edgy,” among other silly descriptors. Whatev.

OK, so: Spoon. This was not my first time seeing Spoon. Spoon are just consummate pros, you know? Like, I am not sure by what metric anything actually constitutes a “hit” anymore in the Industry's current distribution modes. But let’s just say that Spoon have a lot of songs that you know really well. & let’s also save a step by just agreeing that Spoon really know how to crank the shit out of every one of those numbers. I love those guys. I love their capital-C Cool nonchalance. I love that they are like kung-fu masters of the Pop Hook. Wax on Wax the hell off, right?



I do have to go ahead & mention that there was some kind of constant, aggravating BUZZ noise in the PA throughout the entirety of Spoon’s set. Everybody just had to ignore it & hope for it to be resolved & cured but that never did happen. So I was not cool with that rather glaring technical difficulty. But I'm done talking about it now, thanks.

I took some notes, I had a decent set list going. But right now I’m at work & it’s out in the car. “Everything Hits at Once” was played, I can definitely tell you that bc it’s my favorite Spoon song & they don’t always play it. Let’s see, I remember “Cherry Bomb,” “Target,” “Camera,” "Evah," all that great stuff. Oh, Bradford came out & jammed with them for “Who Makes Your Money” from the new album, that was cool. Oh yeah, & they covered a Wolf Parade song, also pretty cool. The band was loose (it was mentioned a few times that this was the last stop on the tour), but they were On.

Spoon, they know what they’re doing & they do it very well.

The More Things Change.

The new Spoon album has been out for several days now, & so probably I needn’t point out how good it is. I’m just going to have to assume you’ve heard it by now. Can we first agree on the following? That the songs are peppy, are poppy; that the sound is as meticulously & lovingly crafted as on any of Spoon’s numerous past albums. Would you also agree with me that, despite its consonance with prior work, Transference has a sound & feel all its own, & that “new” & “surprising” are among its apt descriptors?

So, the new Spoon record is the same & it’s different, I guess that’s my thesis.

Maybe the key is Britt’s voice, which has always carried a certain rawness even as, on balance, the music was pretty slick & pretty smooth. When I think of Spoon, I think quintessentially of the Girls Can Tell album (great title, btw), where there’s a constant sort of tension between the sheen of the production versus the grit in Britt’s voice.

“Grit,” now is a more prominent flavor on the new album than on previous ones. Rough, Raw, & Brash are other adjectives that came to mind on my first listen. (Oh, also: Chunky.) So there’s a new, rougher edge to this music that nonetheless fits seamlessly with the rasp that has always characterized the singing.

OK, but it’s still a Spoon record & so: meticulous attention to detail continues to define all sounds & all combinations of sounds. Nothing is permitted to be haphazard, even as a lot of reference is made here to a slapdash approach. Notice all those parts that seem, randomly, to just peter out or cut off abruptly, even at the expense of completing a chord change, or a lyric. Notice the deliberately graceless segues, into silence or into the next sound, the next song. It’s an interesting strategy, this feigned clumsiness in a work that was so clearly labored over, so plainly perfected. Overall, the impression is of a work that’s bursting with novel ideas, and tripping over itself (interrupting itself) in the service of just getting them all OUT goddammit.

It’s an exciting listen, it’s very fun. &, not incidentally, the whole thing just sounds delicious. One nugget among many that has my attention is how, in “The Mystery Zone,” the slow-decay echo on the guitar chords counterpoints the spunky bass line, whose sound is sharp, immaculate, & satisfyingly fat. The juxtaposition between those two instruments (& between their respective sound-textures) is incongruous, hence compelling to the ear.

Spoon-Mystery Zone mp3

Now, I realize that most people would regard this as a tangential point, but when I talk about how recorded music is now generally explicit in emphasizing its own artifice, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Obviously, there are no samples, loops, & cetera on this album, this here is not a disco thing or a techno thing or hiphop or whatever. It’s not an Experimental recording in any kind of overt way. This is (“just”) the new album by Spoon, which as we know is (“just”) a four-piece, straight-up rock band. (With, now, a fantastic bass player, it bears mentioning.)

& yet, repeatedly & emphatically all over this collection, the point is made that these are studio recordings, constructed piecemeal from disparate components. Some bits are apparent leftovers from the original demos, & are then combined with the slicked-up “professional” parts. So, a particular rhythm guitar part might sound like it was, e.g., recorded on an answering machine in the bathroom –all tinny & flat & faraway. & then that’s juxtaposed with, e.g., a close-miked drum part whose sound is processed rich & full & all state-of-the-arty. I’ve described elsewhere how musical & dramatic impact can derive from the combination of sounds that could not have existed together in the real, physical world. Transference is just a great illustration of this; frequently & expertly on this album, sounds that plainly don’t belong together are combined & provoked into making music with each other.

White Rabbits, & cetera

Somewhere out there is there a satisfactory definition of the Pop Hook? I don’t actually have one yet, but my working version goes something like this: a Hook is where the song sets up a formal expectation, & then immediately resolves it, sometimes in a surprising way. It’s often an aspect of the melody, but a Hook can entail any facet of the song, from snare-fill to chord-change to piano riff to lyric, wherev. Actually, not knowing where the Hook is coming from next is often key to its success. Hooks can get hackneyed, & if you see them coming they’ll just fall flat. So, surprise, immediacy. These are important elements.

Oh, & perfection: that’s the thing about the Hook: it just satisfies. It feels perfect.

& then it keeps walking right on by. Because also key to the successful Hook is that, in the time it takes you to notice & appreciate its clever brilliance, the song has already moved on. Hooks by definition do not stand around waiting for applause. The Hook’s abject nonchalance is its sole irreducible ingredient: the Hook is brilliant & perfect without ever breaking a sweat.

Speaking of which, the new album from Spoon comes out in just a couple of weeks, & so I’m sure we’re all very excited about that.

In the meantime, it’s the end of the year & I’m lurking my way through the sundry “best of” lists of bloggers far more au courant than myself, & I’m seeing everywhere this band called White Rabbits. Which, when I check them out they turn out to be awfully hard to put back down. Is it just me, or does this just immediately
make you want to hear some more?

Percussion Gun - White Rabbits

It does not come as a complete surprise that It’s Frightening was produced by Britt Daniel of, yes, Spoon. There’s a certain sort of crisp efficiency to the sound of this album that’s very Spoon-like. There’s no grime there’s no mud. &, as much as I have waxed enthusiastic elsewhere about grit & dirt & noise, the squeaky-clean sound here is the right choice. Because there’s just no room for clutter inside of these songs. Which are laden, laden with hooks. Much like Spoon, White Rabbits are all about the Hook.

Incidentally, the drumming in “Percussion Gun” sounds to me just like a Burundi rhythm. Bow Wow Wow used it extensively, a very long time ago, but it’s actually a traditional motif from Central Africa. Hear:

C30, C60, C90 Go - Bow Wow Wow

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