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Spoon

Spoon

Signed to label: Merge Records
From: Austin, Texas

BIO! (from merge records

The last time I wrote a Spoon biography, I suggested that perhaps they were the best band in Texas. That will be the last time I ever sell them short.

While 2001's critically acclaimed Girls Can Tell captured Spoon's Britt Daniel finding his own voice -- no, not literally going to lost and found, but truly coming into his own as a unique, world-class singer/songwriter -- 2002's Kill the Moonlight shows Daniel and long time musical conspirator Jim Eno destroying the form book and branching into uncharted territory. Recorded in Eno's Austin studio throughout the winter/spring of 2002, Kill the Moonlight is a staggering achievement, with stylistic range and emotional depth far beyond that of prior Spoon works.

Far less linear than GCT, Kill the Moonlight is as sonically advanced as it is lyrically daring; no longer rooted to a strict guitar-bass-drum format, Spoon's increased use of keyboards, self-created samples and implementation of studio effects is in stark contrast to the more traditionalist GCT. That said, there is no killer gimmick at play, the weapon wielded most often is Britt Daniel's brain. Always a master of melody, Daniel has veered further and further from what could be identified as a signature sound with each Spoon album -- there are no precedents for Daniel's channelling of Alan Vega on the claustrophobic opener "Small Stakes," much as the falsetto vocal w/ minimalist backing of "Stay Don't Go" sounds like nothing else in the band's oeuvre.

But if there is a common thread running through each of Spoon's albums, Kill the Moonlight being their 4th, it is in the way their songs are instantly memorable and impossible to shake. "Jonathan Fisk" (perhaps the only song on KTM that could've been featured on Spoon's 1996 debut, though it wouldn't have sounded nearly as good), "Someone, Something," and "The Way We Get By" have all made for a very pleasant dilemma in record company offices in Chapel Hill and London -- how do you pick a single when you've got at least 3 great ones to choose from?

From year to year Spoon have built an impressive, fanatical international following. Despite some seriously lean years and harsh circumstances (innumerable bass players, being banned from Wyoming until 2004, Daniel's recent brush with death via electrocution), the band have succeeded in constructing their own musical vocabulary and their own creative identity. Whether their commercial success (GCT sold more copies in 2001 than the band's combined back catalogue had managed in 5 years) continues to grow exponentially is far less relevant than what Daniel and Eno are producing in Jim's studio: mind blowing, life affirming rock'n'roll records than are a match for any classic you care to name.

Gerard Cosloy

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