Spoon at Summerfest
The Austin band carries on with being efficiently awesome
Eschewing showy stage antics and crowd banter, Austin indie rockers Spoon blazed through more than 20 songs Monday night at Summerfest’s Harley-Davidson Roadhouse. While Britt Daniel and company didn’t exhibit much of a personal touch with the crowd, chitchat ultimately would have hampered a pleasant summer night of unswerving rock ‘n’ roll cool.
A familiar word came to mind during the performance: consistent. It’s a tag that’s been applied to Spoon from 1998’s A Series Of Sneaks up through 2007’s breakthrough Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. It can seem like a backhanded compliment—who wants to be Tim Duncan when you can be Shaquille O’Neal? But there’s something to be said for a band as ceaselessly efficient as Spoon. This isn’t a band that blows you away with any one particular song or record; it’s more the accumulated greatness of its body of work that impresses.
So it makes sense that Spoon merely churns out one indelibly crafty melodic pop song after another live in concert, and that this is more than satisfactory. The band opened with “The Beast and Dragon, Adored” from 2005’s Gimme Fiction, slickly blending Daniel’s reverb-heavy vocals into a wall of ambient feedback. Even better was “Small Stakes,” which expanded grandly on the studio version with an absolutely driving keyboard and bass line.
One of the most overlooked aspects of Spoon is how incredibly funky these otherwise straight-laced indie boys can be. The disco-era Stones sleaze of “I Turn My Camera On” and the ace cover of Natural History’s “Don’t You Evah” inspired audience members to dance—well, at least as much as they could amid the crowded benches of the Harley-Davidson Roadhouse.
Similar to Spoon’s last Summerfest appearance in 2007, when it previewed tracks from the from the then-unreleased Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, last night’s show featured songs from the band’s just-released Got Nuffin EP. Spoon’s first triple guitar epic “Stroke Their Brains” and the ‘70s rock anthem “Got Nuffin” didn’t garner much attention from the unfamiliar crowd, but still rocked hard. Got Nuffin ought to be another worthy addition to the Spoon discography, which has slowly but surely (and perhaps surprisingly) grown into one of the best in contemporary indie rock. No wonder the band is content to let the music speak for itself.
