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“Jonathan Fisk” – Spoon
(Words/music: Britt Daniel, available on Kill the Moonlight, Merge Records 2002)

In the deluge of retrospectives over the past six months or so, I noticed a trend.  A surprising (well, to me at least) number of people rated Spoon as one of their best (read: favorite) bands of the past decade.  I don’t mean to knock Spoon – I like their records a lot and frequently refer other people to them.  They just never struck me as a transcendently great band – one that would be in the second list of my favorite bands, and certainly not a band I would ever question someone for loving.  I’ve always enjoyed their records, with “enjoyed” being the key word.  They are a consistently good band even if I’ve never been head-over-heels enamored with them.  This is precisely what put the band at the top of MetaCritic’s compendium – by their math, Spoon proved to be the most consistently excellent band of the past decade.

“Consistent” is a bit of a double-edged sword, and to be fair Spoon embodies the most positive qualities of this term.  Even if the sound of each record shifts (and their new record Transference makes Spoon sound a little funkier and looser, at least from the couple of listens I’ve given it over the past few days), they thrive on this sense of sonic equilibrium.  “Jonathan Fisk” does this through heavy repetition, both in the stomp of the drums and the heavy chording hand in the guitar.  From the first note to the end of the song, the band locks into this moderate groove, leading Britt Daniel to sing rhythmically.  Where many of Spoon’s contemporaries use jagged guitar riffs or polyrhythmic percussion, it’s Daniel’s vocals (and a brief burst of guitar at the end) that add a layer of rhythmic variation over the solid bed.  Even if Spoon is opening up their groove (and I imagine that their current live sets will reflect this looseness), they could whip up a consistently tight track with the best of them.  In that sense, it’s easy to see how so many could love a band that delivers so consistently.

More on Spoon: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm