Spoon - Kill The Moonlight

small stakes vs. stay don't go vs gotta feel it vs. back to the life

thats the way we get by

"Paper Tiger" is my favorite Spoon song to hear live.

Just as great on the album.

i always skip it,funny..

Never liked this as much as Girls Can Tell

i think Girls Can Tell is more like a straightforward rock album, and this one has more interesting minmalist ideas in it, so it's the opposite for me

"stay don't go" - jonathon fisk is maybe my least favorite spoon song ever btw

Agreed on "Jonathon Fisk," way too straightforwardly rock for this album. It would have fit nicely on Telephono (both sonically, and quality wise) -- here, not so much.

yeah and i really like when their songs have more space, that one is so crammed w/ guitar iirc

i love this, also my favorite Spoon record:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/bestselling-music-2007/2153-1.jpg

'The Way We Get By'... an elaboration of the underlying themes to 'Girls Can Tell'.

This whole album is solid though... as are most.

This is incredibly tricky. First instinct is Stay Don't Go for the mouth percussion and falsetto, but I think the tambourine through Small Stakes is the most exciting thing ever. It makes me wonder why The Rolling Stones exist.

Spoon rock by bits and pieces, so I'm tempted to vote just for a favorite bit (the depth charger signal half a minute into Back to the Life), but they saved the best for first, this is between the opening two songs. Coin flipped, and that's The Way We Get By.

One of the best rock albums of the 00s.

'paper tiger' because it does something unique and interesting using simple, sparse arrangements.

worse thing about this band is dude's voice (and the mundane live show).

what i originally considered b-teamers, i've developed a special affinity for someone something & don't let it get you down. they sound like they might have grown out of the same song and i like that they stuck them one after the other

at the time it seemed folks considered this a bit of a disappointment after GCT (maybe?), but i always liked it better

I just voted for "Don't Let It Get You Down", and I can't really think of a reason why... other than the fact that I really really like that song and would always be happy to hear it. for something so minimal, it seems surprisingly epic.

also I was very happy the first time I listened to it on headphones and noticed the hard panning on the vox/piano and drums/guitar.

I always had this album on when I'd drive north for riding lessons-"Back to the Life" always got me pumped, like Can doing jock jams. For this reason I'm going with the penultimate.

worse thing about this band is dude's voice (and the mundane live show).

― Charlie Howard, Sunday, February 8, 2009 1:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

wow guy

haha i'm not a massive fan, so i implore you to take my comments with a grain of salt :)

lots of good choices. going with small stakes but this is a fab album. GCT is more even but this one has the higher highs.

(and the mundane live show).

otm saw them at a festival about a year ago, mundane sums that up nicely.

i saw them in 2006-ish at a pretty good venue. sort of a relaxing show in the sense that i could wander off to get a beer occasionally without being too concerned about missing much.

saw 'em once and thought 'only ok,' saw 'em touring for Gimme Fiction and they really killed it.

Dunno I guess maybe I'm, like Sarge said, a bigger fan than I thought: realized just now I've seen them 7 times and always enjoy it thoroughly.

there's definitely a lot there to be a big fan of. there's an intelligence and poise to this band, lacking in a lot of their contemporaries. personally though, i've never managed to conjure more than a casual, dull appreciation.

This album is just a little bit too minimalist for me, I think if they've fleshed a few of the songs out a bit more, it would be a great album instead of a really good one. So, Jonathon Fisk.

i love spoon but both times i've seen them live they were pretty dull

Re: Spoon being mundane live, I saw em a couple years ago, thought it was a good show, but a guy I worked with, a deadhead-y kinda dude, talked to me the next day and was like: "NOT A SINGLE GUITAR SOLO! WOULD IT KILL THEM TO PLAY A GUITAR SOLO!!" It really upset him. I LOLed.

love this album, it's my favorite of theirs. it's all great but the structure of small stakes still blows me away (tension tension tension for the entire song, you're waiting for something big to happen, and then DRUM SOLO)

ehhhh this is easily their worst album to my ears. still, a few good songs. went w/j fisk too.

and yeah they're a pretty dull live band. the records are usually all about super-tight construction and that either doesn't translate well to a show or if it does it ends up being one of those "why am i not just listening to the record?" things

who lets people like this write about music?

Life has gotten so much easier for these guys ever since Pavement broke up. After all, how many flannel-shirt wearing, floppy-haired, Fall sound-alikes can the average person swallow? Oh well, now that the playing field is theirs alone, Spoon do not disappoint. Kill The Moonlight is their most melodically accomplished work to date, shimmying through the primal tambourine shakes of "Small Stakes," breaking a sweat with the spiky lo-fi swagger of "Stay Don't Go," and getting all starry-eyed on the three-and-a-half minute acoustic epic "Don't Let It Get You Down." So good, you'll even forgive them for blatantly Malkmus-derived song titles like "Paper Tiger" and "Vittorio E." --Aidin Vaziri

xpost, yeah, I wasn't blown away by Spoon live, though it was fun -- just not very adventurous. The one exception was probably "Paper Tiger" which became kind of monumental and intense onstage

i think this record is more consistent than girls can tell, but i like the first half of girls can tell more.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I got the tie-breaking vote in about 10 minutes ago

the last 2 songs,who got 0 votes, are actualy great.
Fisk and All The Pretty Girls should got the 0 instead imo

But the riff in All The Pretty Girls sounds like... I dunno, um... a metal garage door, that's reverberating from a big V8 engine in a car in the garage behind it, and it's just reached a frequency that makes the door resonate, and that's what that riff sounds like. Not a guitar. A resonating garage door and a V8 engine.

also I was very happy the first time I listened to it on headphones and noticed the hard panning on the vox/piano and drums/guitar.

You know the way in technical graphics/mechanical drawing where they leave in the construction lines and you can see how the diagram was put together? I've always thought Spoon songs are kinda like that.

I fucking love this band. Wish I'd cottoned on to them in like 1998 or something instead of 2007.

They are doing three back to back to back shows in Austin this summer. Different openers for each show - Black Joe Lewis, Trail of Dead, Low, Atlas Sound.

I've been going through their catalog in response to another thread and jesus, KTM stands like head and shoulders above everything else. I don't think I voted in this poll, but am rather amazed that "Don't Let It Get You Down" didn't destroy the competition. I've only played it like a thousand times this past weekend. The totally fucked up production is the secret. Not just massive fake stereo, but massive fake stereo done wrong, which makes you keep hitting replay in the hopes that the song will finally fire on all cylinders (which it never does).

The second half tails off though.

I don't know. Between DLIGYD, You Got To Feel It and Someone Somthing, there's 3 totally solid tracks out of the last six. (And I like the other three too!)

Nobody voted for Someone Something! How weird. Can't understand why, though to be fair there are a lot of other contendors.

Something To Look Forward To is totally fine as well (the other no-vote option).

paper tiger is the best song on this album and one of the best they've ever written

"You Gotta Feel It" = 1:29 long smile on my face.

I haven't listened to this album in years, for no good reason. I haven't listened to Spoon at all in years, also for no good reason. Momentum thwarted by hiatus? Anyway, I heard a song from this on the radio today and was suddenly inspired to re-listen to the album, and man, it's just so good. Immediately flashed back to so many good memories, not least my memory of how much I loved this album and its predecessor. Feels like ... simpler times? I dunno, but I relished every second of its 35 minutes like I was looking at baby pictures or something.

Man - I hear ya. I can conjure waiting for CTA at certain L platforms and bus stops listening to 'Girls Can Tell' & this rekkid. Simpler times and good memories.

This is one of those albums that I pretty much only listened to in full front to back, it goes down so easy, it feels more like a multi-part suite than an album