I Turn My Camera On [Spoon Feeder: Vol. 4]

Kill the Moonlight was a breakthrough album for Spoon, and part of that success can be attributed to "The Way We Get By", arguably the first song by the band to gain traction beyond their fan base as a "hit" single, at least in the limited sense that a song released on Merge Records can be a "hit". Earlier songs might have had the potential to make this broader mark ("Car Radio", for example, released on a major label itself, ironically), but predated the song-centric age of the mp3-internet and the burgeoning expansion of Indie to the point where it had its own sort of pseudo-mainstream centralization (as a side note/tangent, you could argue that England, a more culturally and geographically compact country, had this structure long before us, but that it took the Internet to create the same sort of phenomenon in the sprawling American continent).

Each Spoon album since then has had at least one single of obvious and immediate appeal; on Gimme Fiction, "I Turn My Camera On" fits this bill, and it's easy to see why. This is a song built for immediacy: with its limber octave-hopping, tick-tock tension bounce and Britt's pure falsetto coo lead vocal spinning mundane nonsense into catchy, spunky nonsense (as many great pop songs do), it is Spoon's most obvious attempt to adapt crowd-pleasing dancefloor tropes to their sparse idiom, all played at three-quarters speed for extra sonic separation, Kill the Moonlight-style. Speaking of which...

Stylistic novelty aside, the song is also interesting for how it neatly provides a bridge of sorts from Moonlight, maintaining the airy, negative space and immediacy of that album, but also displaying the structural simplicity and groove-focus so characteristic of Fiction, an album which has less of the tidy, rapid shifts between ingenious melodic parts and rhythmic sections that characterized its predecessors. Instead, Fiction finds Spoon often exploring prolonged insistence on a single rhythmic or melodic motif, building ominous tension to points of controlled release (see "The Beast and Dragon, Adored", "My Mathematical Mind", "Never Got You"), or developing percussive chants of zen-like focus ("Was It You?", "Camera", "Merchants of Soul"). Fiction's reliance on repetition is probably one reason why, for many, it remains less accessible and immediate than its nearest siblings.

Decora [Spoon Feeder: Vol. 3]

A cover song can be a redundant nonentity, rock stars playing dress up as other rock stars, churning out a sloppy, blurred carbon copy; kudos to Spoon then for approaching others' compositions with the same enlivening creativity and minimalist rigor that they do their own.

Yo La Tengo's "Decora" evokes a hazy sort of slacker grandeur: narcoleptic vocals, slurred lead guitar slashing, simple bass quarter notes and a steady, simple drum thump. It's an endearing (if aloof) little song that ambles its way on-stage, taking its time getting where its going.

Spoon's cover extracts the nugget of tasty melody at the heart of the original and moves it to the forefront. Where the original plays hide the ball, burying its charms under a smoke screen of distortion and ambient guitar effects, Spoon lays all its cards on the table from the get go: Spoon's "Decora" begins with that distinctive (and entirely of their own creation) guitar-bass call and response riff, soon joined by an equally distinctive double tap-hiccuping drum beat. As on their other prominent cover, "Don't You Evah", Spoon seems here to have used the original song as a theoretical starting point, and put faithfulness secondary to tunefulness (as all good covers should); notice inspired details like the guitar and bass synchronizing after the first chorus.

Eventually the song edges closer to the original territory at the wordless, swirling choruses, but notice how within the first ten seconds the entire basic skeleton for Spoon's version of the song is introduced and defined: a spry, punchy, rhythmically engaging and witty translation; in otherwards, a Spoon song.