the 941

For the second installment of my now-two-part series, Road Trip Concerts Featuring Bands Signed to Merge Records (catch episode one here), I visited Orlando with my wife, Rachel, to catch Spoon this past Friday. The concert, held at Club Firestone, was part of the Orlando Weekly’s Anti-Pop Music Festival 2007 and surely served as the event’s climax, even though the party continued all through Saturday night.

If you haven’t heard Spoon, first, clunk your head against the nearest wall, then purchase the band’s most recent disc, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, which a certain writer got all gushy over earlier this year. The record is a leading contender for year-end music critic honors, a perfect marriage of Spoon’s two most distinct poles: straight-up classic pop and freewheeling genre-bending. During the band’s set on Friday, Spoon gave us a healthy dose of Ga Ga, playing nine of the disc’s 10 tracks, conveniently leaving out my personal favorite, “Finer Feelings.” But Spoon also dipped into its impressive back catalogue, dredging up “The Minor Tough” from 1998’s A Series of Sneaks; “Me and the Bean” and “Lines in the Suit” from 2001’s Girls Can Tell; “The Way We Get By,” “Stay Don’t Go,” “Someone Something” and “Back to the Life” from 2002’s Kill the Moonlight and ”The Beast and Dragon, Adored,” “I Turn My Camera On,” “The Delicate Place,” “I Summon You” and “They Never Got You” from 2005’s Gimme Fiction.

The band was awesome: tight, feisty, dapper. There wasn’t much showmanship on display (the band’s onstage demeanor seems to match its restrained on-record one), but the evening was full of highlights: the extended groove of “Don’t You Evah” when lead singer Britt Daniel had to run backstage to track down a Band-Aid for a cut thumb, the ribcage-rattling effects during “The Ghost of You Lingers,” the indie-Motown punch of “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb,” Daniel’s stripped-down solo take on “Bean,” Daniel spitting beer into the air during the encore- and set-closing “Get By.” Even the T-shirts for sale were rad.

The large club was packed, and after mentioning that Spoon hadn’t played Orlando in a while, Daniel said that last time through, the group had performed at the distinctly smaller (but still terrif) venue, The Social. Looking out at the swelling crowd, Daniel’s summary was a bit understated: “I guess we graduated.”

Bookmark to:

Posted in Arts, Current Affairs, Music, News, Religion | Leave a comment