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.