What’s your favorite Spoon album? Well, okay, I’m sure a lot of you might say Kill The Moonlight. But, what’s your favorite Spoon song? That’s much more likely to vary, and there is assuredly no wrong answer. Spoon has a pretty universal appeal, which means different sounds for different tastes. Singer/songwriter and Spoon-founder Britt Daniel has grown throughout this nearly 20-year run, finding interesting ways to make a piano sound punk and cautiously experimenting in more ambient and electronic adornments, but he’s never lost his knack for a good groove. They’ve essentially become the ol’ reliable of the indie-rock wheelhouse (though they’re not exactly “ol’” yet). So, it’s easy to make a list of “best” songs when a band’s catalog already has a surplus of solid jams, but it was too hard to keep it to 10, even leaving off the “hits.” We tried to pick the songs that were the most definitive of Spoon as well as the most integral to their progression.
11-12. Waiting For The Kid To Come Out / Inside Out
Soft Effects / They Want My Soul
The first track comes from 1997’s Soft Effects EP, a time when Spoon were initially being pegged, by most people (understandably), as derivative of either the angular post-punk of Wire or the eccentric rambunctiousness of the Pixies. But there was something about that stretched-out riff on the guitar as it patters around Daniel’s mumbled chip-on-the-shoulder narrator and the playful rhythmic spill across the entire drum kit, it seemed to be the first spark of Britt Daniel coming into his own as a songwriter.
We thought it’d be an enlightening way to kick off this list by tying “Waiting For The Kid,” one of their oldest songs, with one of their brand new ones (from They Want My Soul). First we thought “Outlier” but then it sounded a bit too much like a distant cousin of Arcade Fire’s Reflektor. Then we tried “Knock Knock Knock” and dug it, but the interlaid electronics into jangly guitars with spooky-cool whistling sounded too much like Broken Bells. We needed something that sounded indicative of a new path for them to follow, particularly one where they didn’t sound like they were getting lost or fumbling for directions. “Inside Out” goes for the gusto in terms of chill, orchestral electronica, (have those three words ever been used in succession to describe a Spoon song?) “We got nothing else to give cuz time’s gone inside out.” What an intriguing lyric to wind out this song, as we look back upon this band’s rich catalog.
10. Execution
A Series Of Sneaks
You don’t need a music writer to tell you what Spoon sounds like. You know! It’s taut, aerodynamic and kinetic. It pulls as it pushes. And this, from one of their earliest albums, is when Spoon started to sound like Spoon.
9. The Fitted Shirt
Girls Can Tell
Now, Spoon are a rock’n’roll band, we’re sure of it. But isolate the beat from this track and it could easily supplement either hip-hop or funk. Then again, maybe it sounds a bit like Zeppelin’s “Kashmir?” Still, that ratatat riff bolsters the percussive impact, affecting an irresistible bob-and-weave groove that gives this “rock” song permission to populate the dance floor.
8. Written In Reverse
Transference
This song throws its shoulder into you. That piano’s simple, slamming hook perfectly blends the cool cavort of funk with the snotty shove of punk. “Written In Reverse” is the assertive recess from most of Transference’s ambient-doused, downbeat numbers. Lyrically, it could be an anti-love song or it could be a conceptual stab at surrealism. Or, it could Daniel’s exercise in remedying some writer’s block in a moment of creative disorientation through the wake of excitable blog-fame from hits like “Way We Get By” and “Turn My Camera On,” writing himself backward to the beginning again. With a worn, hollow kind of timbre recalling piano-bar blues, the ivory keys are jingled and jangled through the second verse, easily keeping up with the shuffling bass and slicing guitars.
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