Kill the Moonlight

Everything changed for Spoon after <i>Kill the Moonlight</i>. The Austin, Texas indie-rock legends’ fourth studio album marked a decisive turning point following the major-label fallout that ensnared the release of its predecessor, 2001’s <i>Girls Can Tell</i>. If that record solidified Spoon’s increasingly dependable reputation, then <i>Kill the Moonlight</i> confirmed the group’s status as an undeniably Great Band amidst the already-plentiful early-2000s rock landscape. Spoon’s profile practically rose overnight after <i>Kill the Moonlight</i>’s release in 2002; if you were of a certain age back then, the barroom piano chords that open “The Way We Get By” were practically inescapable on TV shows and in movies (not to mention in actual barrooms). In the years since, the members of Spoon have ascended to indie-rock elder statesmen, as Britt Daniel’s singular vocals and the band’s taut, impossibly precise explosions-as-rock-music have become one of the genre’s most distinctive sonic approaches in this century. And it all began with <i>Kill the Moonlight</i>. For a record that so thoroughly affected the trajectory of Spoon’s career, it’s still shocking how experimental and left-field <i>Kill the Moonlight</i> sounds within the band’s extremely accomplished catalogue. Yes, there are the well-known six-string barn-burners like “You Gotta Feel It” and “Jonathan Fisk”, the latter a triumphant invective against Daniel’s childhood bully (who, incidentally, loved the song so much that he became a devoted fan of the band). But elsewhere, the textures of <i>Kill the Moonlight</i> are also jagged and appealingly eclectic, from the beatbox-laden falsetto’d soul of “Stay Don’t Go” and the rumpled electronic samples of “Paper Tiger” to the gently abrasive lo-fi opener “Small Stakes” and the heaps of piano and keyboard riffs played by Daniel (whose key-pounding contributions are mysteriously credited to “Eggo Johanson”). <i>Kill the Moonlight</i> is the sound of a band building a sound in real time, and the first of many moments in Spoon’s career in which the group’s approach to rock music feels so thrilling and refreshing upon first contact.