From Just A Few Glimpses

Spoon @ Music Hall of Williamsburg 9/13/2010

Car Radio / Nobody Gets Me But You / The Mystery Zone / You Got Yr Cherry Bomb / Trouble Comes Running / The Ghost Of You Lingers / Written In Reverse / Someone Something / Modern World / The Two Sides Of Monsieur Valentine / Don’t You Evah / Finer Feelings / Everything Hits At Once / Don’t Make Me A Target / I Summon You / No Time / Got Nuffin / Black Like Me // Who Makes Your Money / Stay Don’t Go / My Mathematical Mind /// I Turn My Camera On / The Underdog

Do I need to spend more time telling you how brilliant Spoon is; that they are a live rock band with few peers at the moment? This was a set with some nice surprises — “Car Radio” at the start, interesting Wolf Parade and Jay Reatard covers, a particularly spirited version of “Finer Feelings” in the middle, and a slightly under-rehearsed run through one of my top favorites, “The Mystery Zone.” The Music Hall of Williamsburg is a smaller room than they’ve been playing recently, and you can tell — their sound is bigger than the room in some ways, even though their songs make more sense in this sort of intimate setting. I found it odd that they chose to play “My Mathematical Mind” here but not last month at Madison Square Garden. If they had any song built for an arena, that’s the one, but they reserved that for the smallish club where it felt even more towering and epic than usual. Maybe a little perverse, but I like it. It’s Spoon.

Spoon “Written In Reverse”

Try to sing this song and get it right. It’s available at a lot of karaoke bars now, so you can try it for yourself. Do it, and you’ll get a vivid sense of what an incredible rock and roll singer Britt Daniel is. It’s not just the bits where he shreds his vocal cords belting out a chorus full of bitter irony. It’s in every line, he’s always putting an expressive spin on the words, and his voice seems to dance loosely around the tight, overstated downbeat. On paper his words seem a little cryptic, but in context you get exactly how he feels — led on, confused, ready to give up and cut his loses but unwilling to let go of whatever love is keeping him in this awful situation. He sounds thrilled by the drama but totally beaten down by it too. There is so much frustration in this song, but also a fair bit of self-aware humor. The thing that kills here is that he totally gets that it’s funny that he’s still hanging on to this, when there’s nothing there. The song ends on the grim punchline: “I want to show you how I love you / I can see you blankly stare.”

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