Spoon
Kill the Moonlight (Merge)Britt Daniel must hate words like auteur. He’s a songwriter, he’d say, that’s it. Nothing flashy. And he’d be right. But each successive Spoon album puts him and drummer Jim Eno more in the company of the world’s Steven Soderberghs and Don DeLillos, minds who use everyday pop constructs to express visions uniquely theirs. Kill the Moonlight is a full 180-degree turn from the widescreen grandeur of 2001’s best-in-show Girls Can Tell, yet from the insistent first notes of opener “Small Stakes,” it’s just as unmistakeably Spoon. This fourth full-length — or, at 35 minutes, close enough — feels more like digital video: songs pieced together from whatever ideas happened to be handy, edited on the fly, and on the shelves before the paint finished drying. Built mainly of solitary guitar/keyboard figures and elementary rhythm parts, the songs are too direct for this to be Daniel’s Kid A, but he’s obviously enjoying tweaking people’s expectations; his multiple references to mischievous activity are only where the teasing begins. The rest comes in the laddish “The Way We Get By” and snake-charming “All the Pretty Girls Go to the City,” the in-your-face “Johnathon Fisk” and meandering “It Goes On.” In lesser hands, each of these songs could be a massive hit single — the forceful “Something to Look Forward To” may be yet — but Daniel and Eno reveal their greatness by painting with fine lines instead of broad strokes. Now that’s art.
This article appears in August 23 • 2002.