Demob Happy

‘Something to Look Forward to’

8/10

Anyone who got into Spoon’s later albums, ‘Gimme Fiction‘ and ‘Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga‘, will certainly not want to miss out on 2002’s ‘Kill the Moonlight‘. Spoon are a hard band to categorise, at once both willfully experimental and with plenty of crossover appeal. They make lean, concise alt-rock-pop (if I can coin a new genre) with a precise ear for detail. Underneath the deceptive simplicity, there is a ghost in the machine: a penchant for spooked minimalism, textural and spatial abstraction which is at the same time wholly listenable. Influences are vaguely evident, The Beatles and Wire for starters, but Spoon are a band of very subtle genius, operating entirely on their own wavelength, with singular musical concerns.

‘Small Stakes’ builds around a jagged, jabbering guitat loop which threatens to rock out but never does. This unreleased tension is Spoon’s secret weapon, which is why their taut, economical style can be initially underwhelming but somehow gets into your head. ‘The Way We Get By’ marries the irreverance of Iggy Pop with the stripped down blues-punk of The White Stripes on the album’s best known song. Again it feels both raw and tightly arranged; nothing is wasted. ‘Stay Don’t Go’ starts, surprisingly, with a human beatbox, and gradually adds component layers of guitar, piano and electronics. It sounds like they have disassembled a track and put it back together in a different, slightly abstract, but infinitely more funky way. Based around a Britt Daniels falsetto, it is both experimental and pop of the purest, most elemental kind. ‘Paper Tiger’ returns to this abstraction of texture and space with equal success, but with eerier undertones. One of the album’s stand-out tracks, it owes as much to Brian Eno as it does to, say, Wire. It’s final refrain of “I will be there with you when you turn out the light” is as unsettling as it might be construed as comforting.

Elsewhere, ‘Don’t Let it Get You Down’ employs the very pleasing aural trick of having the music echo the vocal melody. It is a technique repeated in the bluesy, bawdy ‘All The Pretty Girls Go To The City’, in which Daniels’ gritty drawl is mirrored in piano and rugged guitar licks. The locomotive ‘Back To The Life’, another album highlight, chugs like a freight train embellished with the bells and whistles of assorted studio trickery. Again, despite the deconstructed nature of the track, it is as lean and direct and memorable as The Beatles’ best.

But for a couple of mediocre tracks (’Someone Something’ is as forgettable as the title suggests) ‘Kill the Moonlight‘ is 85% a classic album. Spoon have a habit (still in evidence in 2007) of making albums that grow on you - their modest initial impressions giving way to reveal music of great depth and permanence.

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