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Britt pop
Spoon find less is more on Gimme Fiction
BY MIKAEL WOOD
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Spoon's official Web site

Rhythm guitarists, listen up: Britt Daniel, frontman of the Austin-based indie-rock band Spoon, is not a supporter. "I think it’s just kind of overused," he says of "distorted rhythm guitar," the lingua franca of rock music since punk first announced its three-chord liberation from technique. "I love the Ramones, but not every band can do that and have it be special. And it just seems like so much of alternative rock is, ‘Okay, we’re gonna throw in a distorted rhythm guitar and just play the chords.’ That’s so boring."

Daniel’s solution — which came to him between Spoon’s first album, 1996’s Telephono, and their second, 1998’s A Series of Sneaks (both Matador) — was to scale back by relying less upon the insistent chug of rhythm guitar and instead focusing on whatever made a song individual. That element could be anything: a lead-guitar line, a keyboard part, a drum beat. The handful of albums Daniel and drummer Jim Eno, Spoon’s only other permanent member, have made since Sneaks have seen this approach bear delicious fruit. Gimme Fiction (Merge), their latest, is full of wiry, stripped-down little gems about . . . well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

"I didn’t know what space meant exactly when we first started recording," says Daniel, who brings Spoon to the Paradise this Tuesday. "I guess if someone played me a song and said, ‘That’s space,’ I would’ve gotten it. But I wasn’t thinking about that when I was writing. Now I’m not sitting there thinking, ‘Okay, what I wanna do is be a minimal band.’ But so often, some of my favorite songs — especially favorite singles — are ones that are very minimal. Like ‘Kiss’ by Prince, or ‘We Will Rock You.’ There’s something special about making a song work with just a few elements."

That’s all they need on Gimme Fiction. Opener "The Beast and Dragon, Adored" is built from the ground up, layering Daniel’s parched croon over a beat and a bass line and an ominous piano figure; when Daniel rips a tinfoil guitar solo, you can practically hear the fuzz in his amp. "I Turn My Camera On" is dry disco rock with metronomic guitar stabs that sound like a tiny string section. "My Mathematical Mind" revolves around a rolling piano line that never seems to resolve.

"I’ll go through a lot of different ideas," Daniel says of the complicated and time-consuming process of recording "different instruments and parts. I’m not saying I record all of them, but I try a bunch, and then once you find something that seems to make it stand out, I emphasize that rather than adding a million things that’ll make everything a wash. I demo a lot; we do a lot of prep work before we start recording."

One result of the band’s spare sound is the attention paid to Daniel’s lyrics, which veer between straight-shooting assessments of the culture the songwriter sees swirling around him to more fanciful character studies of such apocryphal folks as "Monsieur Valentine" and "Sister Jack" and "Jonathan Fisk." Daniel considers himself a fan of the literary rock tradition, but he hesitates to unpack his songs. "With Bob Dylan, everybody’s always trying to figure out what all of his language means or his poetry refers to. Most interviews I’ve seen with him where people ask him, ‘What does this mean?’, he’ll just say, ‘It’s all there. It’s what you take from it.’ I think by that token I’m cool with whatever interpretation anyone has, but I don’t want to ruin it for anyone by saying, ‘It’s absolutely, positively just about this.’ "

As a listener, he admits, there’s the occasional exception. "There’s this song ‘Kid’ by the Pretenders, and I’ve heard it a million times. I always loved the song, not really knowing what it was about. Then someone told me that they had read Chrissie Hynde say that it’s about this mother who’s a prostitute talking to her son or daughter. And when I listened to the song and the lyrics in that light, I got something from it that I’d never heard before. It made the song much more bittersweet, and it took it away from a romantic boy-and-girl level and to a new place. That was a rare example of getting the background and that making it mean more." He laughs. "Usually, I don’t need that."

Spoon headline this Tuesday, June 7, at the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; call (617) 228-6000.


Issue Date: June 3 - 9, 2005
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