Spoon, Oct. 19, Electric Factory
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
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| Photo | Char Vandermeer |
The standard take on Spoon casts them as a band always almost ready to break out. They’ve ridden a steady slow upswing in buzz over the last few years and their last few albums; they own a handful of hooks instantly recognizable from soundtracks and commercials; they write songs with meticulous arrangements and release increasingly spare slow-burning records. It’s easy enough to make the leap to metaphor as they’re touted over and over as the next dues-paid breakout on the strength of a catalogue of restless songs that reach for release but build carefully to frustration and paranoia.
This always-almost status puts them at the top of festival bills, and put them in front of the Electric Factory Friday night, doing the difficult work of translating a series of scrupulous studio songs into a four-man show in a concrete hangar. Sans opener — the scheduled Ponies really tried to make it, they explained — they ran through two dozen songs in a long set and a pair of encores in front of a very full yuppie-indie house. Clearly, this is a band that values their live show as much as their impeccably-produced records: Jim Eno’s drums conquered the echo of the space, and retained much of their studio crispness, the lighting synched carefully with the songs (one production value almost never done right in rock and roll), the couple of missteps (a jumped drum fill toward the end of the set) were quickly noted and passed over by the band.
The midset pairing of Gimme Fiction’s “My Mathematical Mind” and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga’s “The Ghost of You Lingers” brought this thoroughness into relief: They moved from one of their most-tightly coiled pieces to a track greeted, when it leaked, with dismay over its formlessness. Both songs moved perfectly, close to the album versions — as they should, because there are no unearned crescendoes or abrupt transitions in their sound. Neither had the abandon of a performance by a road-warrior band like the Hold Steady or the Drive-By Truckers, bands able to put the performance and the moment over the song. Instead, the performance became like nothing so much as watching Roger Federer play tennis — there’s effort and engagement, but there’s also the sense that even in the moment, they’ve got one eye on perfection.
