Spoon - Stay Don't Go, Back To The Life and Vittorio E
My favorites from Kill the Moonlight. Back to the Life starts off with the same guitar from Blur's Trimm Trabb that the Vines also used in Outtathaway...it feels like this sound keeps showing up in songs recently. Back to the Life slips nicely into Vittorio E, which has a sweet last-song-on-the-album feeling & combines some good slow drumming and a nice bass line with a backing chorus that starts out sounding like it could disney-ify and ruin the song. Thankfully, that never happens, and I'm impressed by it in light of how few songs ever manage to pull off this easy simplicity. It's the end of a long day now; watching the sun come around from the north of the city, bounce off the building next door, and slip through a part in my curtains, the deep yellow light here for just a moment matches up with the "hold on....it goes on..." from the song. Wrapping around to the beginning of the album again, Stay Don't Go is a wonder. I hated it the first time I heard it (actually, I hated the first 45 seconds, then skipped to the next song), then fell in love with it this morning when I heard it the second time. I don't usually have reversals like that on songs... I'm not the best listener when I expect 1 thing and get another, and I didn't like the way this one stuck right out on a first trip through the album.
This isn't that good of a piece about this album, but I'm afraid any writing that I do on it is going to get colored by the amazon review of this album, which seemed like it just wanted to score snarkiness points. Yeah, it's hard to write about generic good-but-not-life-changing indie guitar bands in one paragraph per album. But any review that describes a band's sound in reference to flannel shirts automatically annoys me, and it's hard to shake that out and decide on my own what words to use here.
Anyway, click on the band name above to go to their site & download some free mp3s.