Drummer Jim Eno, Singer/Guitarist Britt Daniel and Bassist Rob Pope of the band Spoon perform during the 2009 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.C Flanigan
Spoon
At the Sound Academy in Toronto on Monday
"It took its time working into my soul. I got to believe it came from rock 'n' roll." That came from Britt Daniel, the tousled genius of Spoon, the tuneful U.S. indie rockers who, in the hearts and minds of many, do it right. Daniel, on the gripping, Lennon-esque The Beast and Dragon, Adored, sang about great dominions that don't come cheap. Spoon, whose currency is worth something, would know.
Daniel may have disillusioned his followers when he recently disclosed that he often doesn't know what he is singing about. "I'm just trying to fit the mood of the song," he said. Spoonies would sooner believe that the Ten Commandments were originally scribbled on the back of an envelope and that the Burning Bush toasted marshmallows.
But if Daniel's lyrics serve the mood of his songs, let's talk about the thrust of the show at the Sound Academy, where elbow room was scarce and a music-bred community was vigorously well served.
The quartet began with Nobody Gets Me But You (off the new, brilliant and occasionally lovestruck Transference), followed by The Way We Get By (an ode to Iggy Pop and footloose camaraderie) and the relentless, fuzzy-bass drive of Got Nuffin' (with the line "When I'm with you, all my brothers/ Oh, I feel like a king).
Spoonies "get" their band. There's a kinship with the 38-year-old Daniel that has developed not by online tweets and toots, but album by album. Spoon, famously mistreated by a major label early in its career, has long been the face of Merge Records, "the indie label that got big and stayed small," according to the recent book Our Noise. Got big and stayed small - same with Spoon.
The Texas-born crew has put out acclaimed music since the 1990s, but it was 2007's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga that went somewhere near mainstream, selling 46,000 copies in its debut week alone - not Lady Gaga numbers, but substantial for an indie.
Because Spoon over the years has experimented - with hook-filled post-punk, Pixies and Pavement rock, the soulful shimmer and horns of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, and the more song-orientated Transference - I was interested in how the band would play live. The sound, with few exceptions, was uniform: succinct pop rock, adamantly carried by muscular bass and drums. Scratchy-voiced singer-guitarist Daniel rarely played his hollow-body electric during song verses. Stylized flourishes included heavily reverbed vocals, single-note piano plinking and artful guitar noise.
Under minimal lighting, Spoon was at once raw, tuneful and irresistibly grooved. These guys may eat uncooked meat, but they do so with the best manners.
The final encore was The Underdog, a spry, self-definitive and triumphant screed about displeasure with the corporate side of music - the middlemen who will not survive, Daniel believes. The song has the good-time bop and roll of Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Except that that isn't true. The young survived - Spoon lives, strongly.
Spoon plays Vancouver's Orpheum Theatre on April 11.