Fun Stuff > BAND
Spoon - Transference. January 26th.
Inlander:
You're not helping. I want to understand what people like about this music. If it was just one or two people digging it then I'd let it go but there are lots and lots of people and some of them are people I know have good musical taste and there are professional music reviewing publications as well and they're all acting like this band is the second coming of rock 'n' roll Jesus and I don't understand because every time I listen to them I find them so boring.
pilsner:
I don't think it's usually feasible to convince someone of something they don't actually hear in the music short of just getting them to give it more listens. What have you listened to? Gimme Fiction?
Inlander:
I don't expect to be convinced, but I want to understand.
I don't know what I've listened to. Not a whole album. A few songs here and there. I saw them play live at a festival once. I've never been motivated to listen to more than a handful of songs because the handful of songs I have listened to haven't done a single thing for me. This is why I'm curious as to why other people like them so much. Is it the lyrics? Do people like the kind of minimal sound the band seems to have? I'm just curious.
pilsner:
The lyrics are part of it, Britt Daniel has a knack for writing lyrics that find a happy medium between the banality of your stereotypical Brit-rock songs and the supposed pretension of your art-rockers (viz. Of Montreal, Art Brut).
The songs while spare are not what I would call minimalist (Low, Destroyer, those I could see as minimalist) but I'll admit adhere to a garage-y simplicity bringing them it into the orbit of say The White Stripes or Black Keys but with... two more members. On a track say like I Turn My Camera On, the composition is exceedingly spare, you essentially get through the song with 2 chords and a very basic drum line and it's clearly about Daniel's vocals more than anything.
But then next track on the album you've got My Mathematical Mind and while you're still not in prog rock territory you've definitely got a lot more going on instrumentally, culminating in a full on free style by the end of the song. Which is why a few songs here and there probably aren't going to answer your questions of where the attraction comes from. Although the band's aesthetic and Daniel's voice are very consistent within each album, the song construction tends to vary quite a bit.
But what you really want to do is go back to A Series of Sneaks and listen to a song like The Minor Tough which I've always felt sounds like what my high school friends' bands would have sounded like if my life were a movie starring Mischa Barton. It's elemental rock with very slutty sounding guitar, and really, either slutty guitar and Daniel's voice does it for you or it doesn't. Everything else is gloss.
Anyway I'm not nor have I ever been a musician as is probably blatantly obvious by how poorly I express myself when I'm trying to break songs down, so I'm sure some of the other Spoon fans on the forum with better musical literacy will be a lot more helpful.
Scarychips:
Nah, really, I think you've pinned it. Well, that's basically how I would explain to someone what the heck is the deal wth Spoon.
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