The Beast and Dragon, Adored [Spoon Feeder: Vol. 5]

This title of this song has always appealed to me: evocative, esoteric and apocalyptic, it is one of the more baroque examples in the Spoon catalog. The song itself, though, I've always felt is somewhat middle-of-the-pack, interesting for the way it steadily builds an atmosphere of dread, but ultimately just somewhat lacking in vitality.

"Beast" establishes Gimme Fiction's repetition-fetish immediately: for most of the song, Spoon stretches out a simple, ominous minor-key chromatic piano progression into a half-speed dirge. Major-key choruses attempt to deliver a release sufficient to match the verses' continuous tension-build (amplified by Britt's strangled guitar salvos, like miniature car collisions), and the second chorus succeeds a bit with its little extension/variation on the initial chord progression. However, the slightly oppressive lethargy of the song is never fully counterbalanced by Britt's vocal performance, and the song has conspicuously few enlivening melodic flourishes by the band. Is it horrible? Not by any means. The end result just comes off as just the slightest bit... well, dull.

At the very least, though, "Beast" does serve as an interesting and relatively effective album opener: an unsettling call-to-arms ('when you don't feel it, it shows, they tear out your soul; and when you believe they call it rock-and-roll') that also functions as a sort of overture and scene-setter for the album (this theatrical, song-as-album-prelude/overture notion is reinforced by the song's lyrics, which reference two later songs, "I Summon You" and "Never Got You").