Spoon: seeking out the taciturn?

I saw Spoon play last night at McMenamins Edgefield, an outdoor venue. The band’s sound is a fairly plain, unadorned one, lacking ultra-complex melodies and varied instrumentation, and I wondered how it would translate from the recordings to a live setting where a fickle audience could quickly get bored without overt stimulation. So praise is due to their sound man, a 30-something guy the band called Hot Pocket who helped pull together the electric piano, drums, bass, and the multitude of guitar and vocal effects into a cohesive, well-balanced mix. He did, however, have a little trouble with the horn section, denying it the punch it deserved on the few songs that featured it.

Britt Daniel, the singer/guitarist/songwriter, was great. He was in complete command of his voice, going from gritty and grainy to soft and fragile and inflecting perfectly on “Black Like Me” and “Eddie’s Ragga.” Too, his guitar playing was representative of the remarkably controlled chaos that lay in wait below the surface of their groove-based sound. While many of the tunes are built around abruptly chopped staccato chords in the vein of Beatles songs like “Penny Lane” and “Getting Better,” his short bursts of spazzed-out soloing breathed new life into them and added an extra dimension, most notably on “Don't Make Me a Target” (which, by the way, he turned into a passionate rocker by breaking into note-cluster fisticuffs with the rhythm section). Daniel’s herky-jerky body language was strangely compelling as well, and reflected the disjointed noises reeling from his guitar. Hot Pocket had the bass dialed and, along with the occasional shaking of tambourines and maracas, it anchored the songs onto an accessible, head-bobbing groove. Plenty of folks were grooving too. Families came out with their 2.5 children in tow, high school kids hopped around and crowd-surfed, scenesters took it all in while sipping their microbrews, and old drunk people bump-and-grinded to some freaky rhythm that only they could hear.

“The Ghost of You Lingers” highlighted the show. The drummer took a break, as did the bass player, and the two pianos onstage were both pounded simultaneously, producing a haunting sense of urgency. Cranking up the reverb on his vocal, Daniel put the guitar away and aided in the creation of a spiritual and ethereal mood that silenced and hypnotized the audience into rapt awe. Accented by blasts of rough static that thundered through the crowd, the song was unlike anything they played all night. The static was awesomely effective live, heavier and infused with more bass than on the record. Like an earthquake, it started at your feet and traveled upward through your torso before exploding in and out of your domepiece. Daniel added to the ambience every now and then by stomping an echo pedal and letting his voice dwell and waver in the cooling summer air, marking what finally felt like a fitting start to the season.

NOTES:

They covered the Rolling Stones' "Rocks Off" in the encore and it seemed like only a few people in the audience really got into it. The fact that Daniel flubbed the words and mixed up some verses might have had something to do with it.

Conspicuously absent from the set was “The Way We Get By,” a piano-driven fan favorite. I overheard some grousing at the end of the show about its exclusion and someone said that ever since the song was featured on television’s “The OC,” the band had stopped playing it.