Everything Hits at Once [Spoon Feeder: Vol. 1]

This is the first installment of "Spoon Feeder", a [hopefully] regular feature wherein I examine, dissect and reflect on songs from the vast and spectacular Spoon catalog.

In 2001, Spoon was coming off the hangover of a major-label sign-and-drop debacle with Elektra Records. Picked up by the label as they were on the rise, they released the magnificent A Series of Sneaks to commercial ambivalence. Agreements and promises apparently went breached and unfulfilled and Spoon was dropped from the label (a tumultuous time out of which emerged the excellent Agony of Laffitte EP, their musical kiss-off to Elektra, and Elektra A&R man Ronn Laffitte in particular). Older, and we can perhaps speculate, somewhat wiser from the experience, they released Girls Can Tell.

Girls Can Tell marked a new phase for Spoon. Its predecessor, 1998's A Series of Sneaks was an incredibly lean and muscular collection of tightly-wound indie rock. The album has a dry, even dusty sort of sparseness to it; even at its most anthemic ("Car Radio", "Utilitarian", the sublime "Advance Cassette") it sounds shambling, skeletal. Furthermore, despite its innovative, extra-terse songcraft, it had a fairly direct sound and instrumentation that placed it directly in the 90's mainstream American Indie lineage of the Pixies, Pavement, etc.

Girls Can Tell finds Spoon fully embracing an older vein of rock tradition: the supple grooves of 60's R&B, Motown and Blue-Eyed Soul (a vein they first explored on 2000's extremely strong Love Ways EP). From the very first bars of "Everything Hits at Once", Girls Can Tell's opening track, Spoon's broadened musical arsenal is on display.

"Everything Hits at Once" exemplifies a particular type of smoky, minor-key Spoon song that can aptly be called noir-pop. It doesn't forgo the compositional brilliance displayed on A Series of Sneaks; it maintains an uncanny sense of song architecture, the deft deployment of melody around a dynamic rhythmic core, but in its deeper, echoing production and expanded instrumentation, all chiming keys and fluttering mellotron, the song exemplifies its album's cooler tonal palette. Girls Can Tell is, on balance, a rather nocturnal album, and "Everything Hits at Once" is the album's overture: it captures the sound of coasting through the city at night, riding the insistent pulse of a sleepwalking metropolis in a dream-like haze, wandering to escape some regret, or nurse some deep, lingering wound. A persistent undercurrent of gentle longing emerges from every corner of this song, but perhaps most brilliantly from the four-note mirrored sighing piano and guitar lines that ascend repeatedly over the chorus; ah, but then there's the lovely bridge as well, with its see-sawing call and response mellotron bursts; ah, but also the lovely, ethereal fade out, haunted by Britt Daniel's ghost-like coo...

In the end, as with many of Spoon's best songs, there are many "best" moments, and it is hard not to underline nearly every detail of "Everything Hits at Once" for the high degree of its craft and the class evinced in its execution.