Never Enough Notes e-zine // reviews + interviews + music

Being a long term lover of Spoon and currently enjoying through the honeymoon period with White Rabbits, this line up had me at hello. Seeing as Britt Daniels took them under his sizeable wing, producing their album It’s Frightening, the matching on this bill evidently isn’t mere coincidence, though nothing less is expected from ATP.

For the performance White Rabbits put in, you feel they deserve more from their static Tuesday night crowd. The interplay between songs, the trading instruments, the passionate delivery, they do everything they can to ignite the room. They aren’t helped by an incredibly quiet volume level to their set that struggles to fill the vast room, played almost at a background level making it much more difficult to truly excite the way only loud music can. Even the thumping Percussion Gun doesn’t get the rapturous response it deserves which really does sum it all up.

The performance itself was incredibly tight, as you’d expect from a band who tours as much as they do, leaving you feeling as though you were listening to the albums themselves. The harmonised vocal lines particularly impressive as they effortlessly weave together through pained reservation to desperate yelps, but all spot on. Sonically, they’re a perfect coupling to Spoon and despite the setbacks which are not from their own doing, they would be the perfect warm up.

Having recently released Transference, a jarring album by Spoon’s standards when you consider the two which preceded it, I was expecting their set to feature heavily from it. With a back catalogue as wealthy as theirs though, the set explored each album though predominantly focused on tracks from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Gimme Fiction. Only a few tracks from Transference make the set though each of those sounding arguably better in the live environment than on the slightly contrived production on the album itself.

With a band like Spoon, with so many obvious highlights on each album, they’re never going to be able to please all the people all of the time, though with songs like “The Way We Get By”, “The Underdog”, “I Turn My Camera On” they still do their best to achieve that. Once again though, the issue of a lack of volume and an indifferent unfamiliarity in the audience for such an established artist is evident when the opening notes of tracks like “Jonathan Fisk” barely get a reaction. It does make it hard to get lost in the moment, even visually as Britt Daniels enigmatic performance, the rest of the band remain stoic. Sure, these Texans aren’t about the spectacle, they’re about the songs but it’s when the intricacies in the studio editing that have become such a monumental part of their sound since Kill The Moonlight which are hard to untangle from the live sound it’s hard to do anything but concentrate, scratch your beard and nod appreciatively.

It’s funny how a band who started off with more than a mild nod to The Pixies so many albums ago whose sound you knew would be fantastic live before you’d even heard them (Quincy Punk Episode?) have become such masters in the studio as to introduce such subtleties to their incredibly catchy songs that under these circumstances it just doesn’t feel like this is how it’s meant to be heard. It’s still Spoon and Spoon are awesome, but this was definitely not the best time I’ve seen them.

By Steven Morgan