When You Turn Out The Light

Spoon @ Bowery Ballroom, 4/23/2007
Don’t You Evah / My Mathematical Mind / Stay Don’t Go / The Fitted Shirt / The Delicate Place / Rhthm and Soul / The Beast and Dragon, Adored / Me and the Bean / I Turn My Camera On / Don’t Make Me A Target / Paper Tiger / Everything Hits At Once / The Way We Get By / Eddie’s Ragga / Vittorio E / They Never Got You / I Summon You / Jonothon Fisk // Black Like Me / Someone Something / The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine / Mountain To Sound

Spoon “Paper Tiger” (Live @ SXSW 2002) –

Small Stakes Ensure You The Minimum Blues: It’s a nice change of pace to see a show that I know will be satisfying and engaging no matter what the band plays. I get caught up in expectations and little wishes to hear certain songs so often, and it makes it so that little things like, say, Jarvis not playing “Black Magic,” can taint an otherwise fantastic gig in my memory. This isn’t to say that there aren’t some unlikely Spoon songs I would’ve loved to have heard last night (“No You’re Not” and “Advance Cassette” both immediately spring to mind) but I didn’t really have my hopes up. My friends definitely got their wishes, though. “Mountain To Sound” for the longterm fan, “Stay Don’t Go” and a solid selection of classics from the last three albums for the relative newcomer.

Something To Look Forward To: Five new songs were played, and I heard three of them for the very first time last night. I’m not really sure what to say about them just yet. They were all fine, but I think I need to wait to hear the studio recordings to make any sort of judgment. At face value, the new stuff isn’t a dramatic departure from what they’ve been doing in this decade, but there is a subtle difference, and I think Jessica Hopper was pretty much on the money with this observation from her early impressions of the finished album: “Static in its melancholy, negotiates a small space well.”

I Summon My Love Back To Me: Just as I had noticed at the Pitchfork festival last July, “I Summon You” has become a clear fan favorite, and though it was never released as a single, it is greeted by the audience as if it were a huge radio hit. This isn’t exactly mystifying — it’s a gorgeous and touching song, and its sentiment is rather ideal for mix tapes and whatnot. My personal favorite, “The Beast and Dragon, Adored,” gets a similarly strong response, though the big hit from Gimme Fiction “I Turn My Camera On” seemed to get shrugged off by a good chunk of the audience. In fairness, it was kind of a so-so performance of that song, and the crowd was ridiculously stiff for almost all of the funky and/or up-tempo numbers. This might just be a Bowery Ballroom thing — people are almost always quite sedate at that venue for some reason, even when people are there to see things like LCD Soundsystem. People always bitch about chilly NYC audiences, but I don’t know, maybe it’s got more to do with the vibe of the physical space sometimes.

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