When artists, working solo or in a group, set a high bar early on, and continue to meet or even exceed those standards over the years, we require constant amazement, if not a total bottom-up reinvention along the way. Should they merely deliver ongoing refinement – with a dash of left turns here and there – we damn them with the faintest of praiseworthy terms: consistency. The exceptional work that set our expectations in the first place fades from memory. Familiarity breeds a bored sigh.
Such is the case with Spoon. The Austin band gets plenty of popular and critical love, no doubt, just not enough of either. Huge commercial success may be a lost cause for most rock outfits nowadays, but appreciation is another matter entirely. As a whole, Spoon’s first-rate catalog is taken for granted. Almost everyone agrees the group makes taut and elegant rock ‘n’ roll, hefty with melodic and emotional verve, with remarkable dependability. And yet there’s a widely accepted, if implicit, notion that rock music is more important, more serious, more worthy, when served with a side of genre blending and obfuscation, rather than straight up. Here’s the old Beatles versus Stones divide, still inserting a false dichotomy into our evaluation of rock, fifty years later.
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, Gags was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of Godney was hovering over the waters.
$0.2m advantage w/ 2 extra shows?
What kinda carnage hath Brinty wrought.
If that's your idea of destroyed what word describes the tattered remnants of Britney's psyche?
