Those of you who have been long-time, faithful members of the Hall should be well familiar with our running “WE REVIEW ECONO” feature. Under “WRE” rules, reviewers of anything — shows, albums, movies, 1970s TV shows starring Bill Shatner, whatever — are forced to encapsulate their feelings about the creative enterprise under scrutiny in one sentence. No more, no less — and no bullet lists allowed! Your sentence can be long and tortuous, or succinct and sharp; the choice is yours — remembering that the RTH audience can be ruthless when evaluating the critical brevity of your essay. Following is my one-sentence review of the Spoon live show I caught with Townsman cjdawson at DC’s 9:30 club tonight:
Spoon (at least in a live setting) seems to wish it was a trippy, neo-prog band — but, despite their occasionally successful, edgy Blur- and Radiohead- and Pink Floyd-isms, the fact remains that they’re a guitar pop band… and, thankfully, not a bad one, at that.
HVB
I’m looking forward to seeing them Friday at Radio City. They’ve come a long way since I saw them eons ago at Acme Underground at a CMJ show.
I can’t speak for the band live, but Spoon’s recordings always come close to being something I like.
I find them to be a bit uneven, but the songs I like, I really, really like.
BTW, I think Dire Straits is the proper spelling for the band, (re: the poll).
Thanks for correcting the spelling, cher! I knew something looked funny.
Last night’s show was awesome. Britt Daniel stated that they might be the band that played Brownie’s the most times that ended up playing Radio City. I wonder if that might be true.
When I think of “prog,” I mostly think of Yes, ELP and other highly technical musicians who are trying to stuff a lot of composition and technique into their tunes. So, for example, I don’t think of Spoon’s namesake band, Can, as a prog band. I think of them more as being a bit like Wilco (maybe cooler, though) with the goal of deconstructing the pop song.
They are a super-solid live band with a number of great tunes to choose from and I think it actually may work better live than on record. I loved it!
I always think of Spoon as tight, sparse, soul band style applied to indie rock.
They’re like Booker T & The MG’s for people who like Pavement.