[.ca] Kill The Moonlight

From Amazon.com:
Life has gotten so much easier for these guys ever since Pavement broke up. After all, how many flannel-shirt wearing, floppy-haired, Fall sound-alikes can the average person swallow? Oh well, now that the playing field is theirs alone, Spoon do not disappoint. Kill The Moonlight is their most melodically accomplished work to date, shimmying through the primal tambourine shakes of "Small Stakes," breaking a sweat with the spiky lo-fi swagger of "Stay Don't Go," and getting all starry-eyed on the three-and-a-half minute acoustic epic "Don't Let It Get You Down." So good, you'll even forgive them for blatantly Malkmus-derived song titles like "Paper Tiger" and "Vittorio E." --Aidin Vaziri

spoon:
i just saw this band live on lacl, they are a pretty good live band and i love their music so i givve this cd 4 stars.

The Opposite of Pavement...but still a good record:
Ok, So why does anyone think this sounds remotely like pavement???I feel like it is the exact opposite. This is NOT a bad thing..since pavement is great and why would anyone want to hear a remake of a great indie rock band..thats just stupid. But to give a huge comparison: Spoon loves OPEN SPACE! like other reviews have noted. Pavement LOVES noise...yes its sparse but in a completely different way. Spoon loves to mix up lots of different styles of music and put it into one good disk. I've only had this album for..um..one listen..but i can tell that is one of those records that i will just put in at different times and it wont grow old.

Taking steps:
Okay, I'm going to admit first that I'm really new to the whole genre (if I can dare to call it that) of indie. I read some of the other reviews and noticed that they've been compared to Pavement and a few others I have heard before. I think Wilco was one of them too. I'm not really, intimately familiar with those bands so I can't say that they are or are not. Working from that perspective, coming at Spoon from a recommendation and with no experience with the type of music, I have to say that I love this album. I bought it and drove to the beach (like a four hour trip) and listened to it the whole way down and the whole way back. I agree with some of the other reviews that the beat-box song can be annoying but other than that songs like Jonathon Fisk, Somebodys Something and Vittorio E are fantastic accomplishments that are a real joy to listen to. I can't say that I have 'Girls can Tell' but having gotten this one makes me eager to get it as well as for the group to do something else. Bottom line: this is a must have for any person serious about music.

Not as good as Girls Can Tell and still worth getting:
Spoon and Wilco are the best bands in America. Now that Pavement is done, Pulp seems to be through, Blur is disintegrating, and the White Stripes - despite all of the praise they've gotten - have taken a step down from the sincerity and purpose of their best work, the only bands whose next album I anxiously await are Spoon, Wilco, and Radiohead. And of the three, Spoon is probably the most fun and has the most potential ahead of them. This album is very good, but weaker than Girls Can Tell not because the production is too spare or anything; the songs just aren't as consistent. There are only (only!) five truly great songs on this album: The Way We Get By, Something to Look Forward To, Stay Don't Go, Jonathon Fisk, and Vittorio E. Back to the Life and All the Pretty Girls Go to the City are just very good; I liked the second one a lot better until I realized that it had exactly the same tune as that "never met a girl like you before" song by Edwyn Collins. Look into that Edwyn, you may have some money coming to you. But still, that is a great great album. Lyrically, I think, nothing on this album is as good as Everything Hits at Once, Anything You Want, or Lines in the Suit. Musically, a few...anyway, why am I complaining: I remember reading mediocre reviews of Sticky Fingers and Abbey Road in old issues of Rolling Stone, where the critic complained that all of the songs just weren't as great as the greatest songs the band had ever done. It's a luxury you have when a band is so good that you can become a fussy connoisseur, while writing extremely tolerant reviews of bands like Creed and Live. Give them a few more years and maybe those Stones and Beatles comparisons won't sound too ridiculous. They're the closest we can get to the excitement people must have felt picking up those records in the 60s and 70s for the first time.

Corporate pop=bad, indie pop=good:
"Kill The Moonlight" is one of those albums I love without being able to say exactly why I love it. Indie music is just as full of copying as the mainstream, but this band still manages to forge ahead by cherry-picking elements of indie rock and indie pop to form their own label-ducking creation. Boasting a sound that's innovative and eclectic but still understated, Spoon walk some fine lines with this album. For stuff that's apparently simple on the surface, Spoon's songs manage to remain musically interesting for a very long time, due in no small part to the tremendous diversity and astounding production found on this album. There are a few songs here that can be properly said to rock, most notably the hard-driving "Jonathan Fisk" and the darkly edgy "All The Pretty Girls Go To The City," but the highlights lie elsewhere. Most of the songs here display a healthy dose of classic pop sensibility, but Spoon separate themselves from the pack by bringing in found sounds ranging from pianos to tambourines to electronics. The best tune, "Back To The Life," is a marvel of pop craftsmanship, creating a perfect song out of seemingly whatever elements the band could think of: hand claps, strings, maracas (I think), snatches of acoustic guitar, and some electronic bleeps, sweeps, and creeps. The opener "Small Stakes" consists of nothing but Britt Daniel's sweaty, twangy vocals backed by a tambourine line and a sparse electronic beat, but it's brilliantly enhanced by its spacious production. In another deceptively ingenious idea, "Stay Don't Go" actually uses some heavy breathing for a backbeat, and the result sounds much better you might expect. Other songs, like "The Way We Get By," "Don't Let It Get You Down," and "You Gotta Feel It," are among the peppiest and most transcendently catchy of the past few years. Much like the Shins, these guys know how to put together a song. "Kill The Moonlight" comes highly recommended.

• Small Stakes
• 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
• Vittorio E