(t5!) Heroes Of The Zeroes Albums: #26: Spoon – Kill The Moonlight (2002)

Spoon isn’t really a band, it’s a disease. Throughout the zeroes, they’ve been contaminating indie ears with catchy amazing pop songs, earworms that bury themselves in the crevices of people’s brains. They’ve infected the decade with four (FOUR!) paramount albums. Anyone of these contagious albums would’ve probably made this spot, but the best (read: my favorite) album of the bunch is Kill The Moonlight. Girls Can Tell, the album before, was the revelation that these guys aren’t to be fucked with, but this one summarizes their uncanny ability to take breaths away and infect people with last-song syndromes.

Kill The Moonlight manages to be so splendid by expanding their musical capabilities even further and by assimilating additional components to their approach. The introductory track “Small Stakes” is a brave mega-minimal exercise where the only support lead Britt Daniel gets are darting electric pianos, a shuffling tambourine, and a subtle drum machine. The rippling effect the percussions make in “Paper Tiger” gives it a ghostly feeling. And as far as I know, this is the first time an indie rock band brought beatboxing into play; in “Stay Don’t Go”, it prepares the tempo without sounding like a caricature of a Timbaland or a Rahzel song.

The listening citizenry also saw Spoon hone their craft in 2002 because the songwriting and the artistry with their instruments in Kill The Moonlight is top notch. If you have a line graph representing Daniel’s confidence as a singer and lyricist vs. years of practice, you’ll see a progression with a positive slope. He pens the most playful lyrics, enhanced by the indelible melodies and invigorating instrumentation. The piano breakdown in “The Way We Get By” already sounds cool, but it ups its coolness when it’s sandwiched by lines like “you sweet talk like a cop and you know it” and “we believe in the sum of ourselves”. “Jonathon Fisk” sounds like a band enjoying their instruments, proving that even a bully can’t denigrate the rock n’ roll spirit. He’s so sure of himself that he even laughs like a megalomaniacal figure before “Back To The Life” starts, just to convey how way too easy this is.

Before the four awesome albums of the zeroes, they released albums in the nineties, Telephono and A Series Of Sneaks, that weren’t substandard either. So overall, it hasn’t been a terrible career for the underdogs from Austin, Texas. It’s sort of unfortunate that, other than a few stints as movie soundtracks, they’ve been totally ignored by the mainstream public. Also, they never do well in lists like these because their awesome records laid out across the zeroes cause the tastemakers to split their votes on polls like these. Optimistically, Spoon finally gets all the accolades, the packed arenas, the platinum sales, the breakthrough it deserves in the tens. It’d be sick if they didn’t.