Don't Call Spoon 'Indie Rock'
The rock band Spoon's fourth longplayer, Kill the Moonlight, which will see release on Merge Records Aug. 20, finds the group continuing to evolve its already distinctive sound. "We did a lot of things on Kill the Moonlight that we hadn't done before," said band leader Britt Daniel, on the phone from his home in Austin, Texas. "This is not to say that it's an experimental record, because we're a pop band. But we tried to experiment with what we could do to make the songs stand out and be unique."
Meshing classic rock 'n' roll structures from Chuck Berry to The Beatles with proto-punk à la Iggy Pop and post-punk that's seen them compared to The Pixies, the core members of Spoon — guitarist/singer/writer Daniel and drummer Jim Eno — with a changing cast of other musicians, have crafted a unique sonic identity. The new album's 12 rockers burst with emotional intensity and ass-shaking tension.
Those who have heard advance copies of the album have noted that it uses
guitar sparingly and keyboards, including piano, heavily, despite the
praise Daniel's garnered for his guitar style; riffs on previous albums rip
in charismatic staccato eruptions to form classic melody lines. According to Daniel, however, guitar is actually quite prevalent on Kill the Moonlight: "Nine of the 12 songs have guitar, but those three songs [that don't] must really stand out to people. We wanted to try out some things we hadn't done before. I think indie rock as a genre is just plain boring, and I was reacting a bit — 'people still call us indie rock, do they? Well, let's try this then.'
"I still write songs the same way," Daniel continued. "But it's the instrumentation and production where we wanted to try to use our brains more, to try things we haven't tried. I think that's one thing that makes the best bands exciting, when they don't make the same record over and over again."
Daniel explained that the spare sound was due to technical choices made in the studio. "It seems sparse because on this record we don't use compression in the mix," he said. "If we do use it, we barely touch the compression at all. It makes things sound very different."
The album's 12 songs are "Small Stakes," "That's the Way We Get By," "Something to Look Forward to," "Stay Don't Go," "Jonathan Fisk," "Paper Tiger," "Someone, Something," "Don't Let It Get You Down," "All the Pretty Girls Go to the City," "You Gotta Feel It," "Back to the Life" and "Vittorio E."
Moonlight's arrangements and production approach reflect Daniel's attention to "the details." Using "Jonathan Fisk" as an example, he said, "We tried it all these different ways and it wasn't really that powerful, and so finally we just kind of made it electric guitar and tom-heavy drums, which to us sounded more garage. That was the way we recorded it. We recorded it all live. You can hear the engineer at the beginning of the song say, 'I like it!' He was trying to psych us up because it was, like, our 10th take."
The band chose to leave such so-called "mistakes" in the album's final mix, adding to its texture. On "Something to Look Forward to" — with lyrics offering folk wisdom on male-female mating rituals — Daniel pulls his guitar strings seductively, getting an angular sound in a circular pattern; just before the drums enter, his count and a groan from the gut punctuate, and the sound opens up. It's a heady moment.
"The Way We Get By" is vibrant, bursting with humor and the youthful spirit of rag-tag adventure, with a reference to the Stooges' famous second album, Fun House (1970), and two references to Pop's classic solo effort, Lust for Life (1977). The line "We go to sleep to shake appeal," for example, is a direct reference to Pop's daring rocker, "Shake Appeal." "I kind of envision these people [the lovers in the song] hanging out in one town and, like, doing drugs and going to shows and sleeping together every night. You know, 'living wild'." There are plans to shoot a video for the song.
"The Way We Get By" isn't the only song with "shake appeal." Highly danceable, "You Gotta Feel It" is a paean to right-brained thinking. "I know some people who I've played with who are just so analytical about the way they do music. This song is about my response to that. You gotta feel it," Daniel laughed. "You'll make better music.
"I remember playing with somebody one time who had played a great bass lick while we were forming a song. He never would play it that way again and I said to him, 'Why don't you play it like this?' And I would sing it out to him or I would play it on my guitar. 'This is the way you did it that one time and it sounded real good.' And he said, 'Oh, I can't play it like that because it's not in the chord structure. I never should have played it like that.' It's good to know [what notes are in the] chords, but I don't think that you should play them always. It's just — you gotta feel it."
Daniel hopes the danceable songs on the album will help break Spoon out of the indie ghetto. "I hope we don't sound indie," he said, adding: "I never thought that Spoon would make a record that people could dance to. But if we did, then that's great. 'Stay Don't Go' — I'd love to see that become a dance song, you know? Like a disco song. That'd be great."
Recorded at drummer Jim Eno's home studio in Austin, the album was produced by Eno, Daniel and Mike McCarthy, who played 12-string guitar on some cuts. Joshua Zarbo returned on bass for some songs, helped by John Clayton and Roman Kuebler. Brad Shenfeld played dabouke. Eggo Johanson provided keyboard parts, and Matt Brown played saxophone on a number of songs including "You Gotta Feel It."
Merge is currently streaming Kill the Moonlight in its entirely at http://www.mergerecords.com/news.html. A seven-inch single was released on July 20th. The A-side, from Moonlight, is "Someone, Something." The two non-album B-sides are "Is This the Last Time?" and "In the Right Place the Right Time."
In June, Merge reissued 1998's A Series of Sneaks, which some critics have called a masterpiece. The album was originally released on the major label, Elektra Records. The group, which had previously recorded for Matador, was wooed and signed by an A&R man named Ron Laffitte. But once the album was released, Elektra did little to promote it. "We had a lot of reservations about going to a major label and he [Laffitte] definitely knew those and talked us through them," Daniel recalled. "[But] he really changed once we signed."
The experience led to a seven-inch single in 2000 on Saddle Creek titled The Agony of Laffitte, which recounted the group's sour experience at the hands of Elektra and the A&R man. The single's two songs were added as bonus tracks to the Merge version of A Series of Sneaks — a nice touch that Laffitte himself will surely appreciate.
Because of the bad business experiences associated with the album, Daniel said, "I stopped listening to A Series of Sneaks intentionally, then listened again for the first time in a long while on my car stereo as I was running errands in Chicago in the summer of '98, and I thought, wow, this is actually really good!"
After leaving Elektra, Spoon recorded Girls Can Tell on their own, then signed with Merge, which released the album in 2001. Merge is owned by members of the popular North Carolina-based band, Superchunk. Daniel says owners Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance "are really good people and they've definitely done us right."
Besides Kill the Moonlight, A Series of Sneaks's reissue and the new seven-inch, Daniel will release a new split CD-EP with Bright Eyes on September 24 (Post-Parlo Records ships pre-orders August 20). Daniel and Bright Eyes' Colin Oberst each contributed two new songs to the EP, recorded at Oberst's house in Omaha, Neb., over three days in April 2002, part of a limited 10-CD series called "HOME." "We co-wrote a couple songs together," Daniel explained. "Then we each had a song that the other had written. And we just recorded them real fast. I mixed them down here [in Austin]. I think it came out pretty good."
Spoon will tour heavily behind Moonlight, with 20 East Coast dates in September, an extensive West Coast tour in October, including a smattering of
dates in the Midwest and the Southern U.S., and Canada.
In 2001, Girls Can Tell struck a nerve. The album placed #44 on the Village Voice's annual Pazz and Jop Poll of nearly 1,000 rock critics. The album was widely reviewed and made many critics' individual top 10 lists. It's been a "surprising, welcome change," Daniel said. That outside acceptance, he noted, "probably makes us more courageous.
"When nothing seems to be working right it's harder to take [creative] risks," Daniel continued. "For so many years we felt like we were banging our heads against the wall. To have that improve so drastically on one record was a real — well, that meant a lot to both me and Jim, I think."
For tour dates, news and occasional free MP3s visit Spoon's Web site. — Jillian Steinberger [Wednesday, August 7, 2002]
|
