Spoon

Spoon Does the Math and Bangs Out a Minimalist Masterpiece...

Let’s get this straight from the beginning: I am mad about this band—have been ever since someone (can’t remember who but thanks a bunch) loaned me a copy of then-new Kill the Moonlight in 2002. It was love at first listen. I respond to understatement, real singing and songs that cleverly get to the hook, but the hook itself is essential. Spoon has all that, plus zero extraneous stuff—everything this band puts into a track is there for a reason. The band has taken what I love about music, from The Beatles to Marvin Gaye, and boiled it down to its essence.

On “My Mathematical Mind,” perhaps the most mind-blowing of its generally irresistible songs on the new Gimme Fiction, Spoon creates an anthem out of seemingly spare parts—a pounding piano riff, a crashing cymbal, electric guitar scribbles, a hyper-rhythmic vocal and Spoon’s secret weapon: a righteously old-school shaker. For this unconventional band, the traditional hand-percussion tools—shaker, tambourine and handclaps—are more than an afterthought. “When I handed in Kill the Moonlight,” says singer/guitarist Britt Daniel with a soft laugh, “I told our label guy in Europe that the record was all about lead tambourine—that it was a complex tambourine record.” And now there are two.

In 1998, four years after Temple, Texas, native Daniel formed the band in Austin with drummer Jim Eno (they’ve gone through several bass players), Elektra unceremoniously dropped them shortly after the release of A Series of Sneaks, inadvertently authoring the same storyline that later made Wilco’s former company Reprise the poster boys for major-label boneheaded-ness; Sneaks was apparently not the sort of one-listen alt-radio fodder A&R exec Ron Lafitte had envisioned when he signed the band. But unlike Wilco, who parlayed its rejection into media acclaim and eventual dramatically increased sales, Spoon sank back into indie obscurity following its brief flirtation with major labeldom.

Daniel might have felt burned by the Elektra experience, but he managed to outfox the major in one crucial regard—getting back the master. In fact, the band owns all its masters as well as its publishing, allowing them to make good money on every CD sold—that doesn’t happen in major-label deals. “Every band that works with Merge [makes money], depending on how many records they sell,” Daniel confirms. Moonlight has sold nearly 80,000 copies thus far.