Spoon at the Showbox: We're Old?
Our sophomore year boyfriend was mid-grope when we heard our first Spoon song and stopped paying attention to him entirely. While the relationship proved futile (shocking!) our love for "Change My Life" remains as solid as ever. Is it hormone-fueled nostalgia that keeps our Spoon flame burning? Or is it just Britt Daniel?
It's Britt Daniel.
And eight incredible albums.
It's like a 49/51 split, really.
We're not even going to try and write about Spoon objectively. They're our favorite band and will continue to be as long as they keep releasing fantastic records (and probably even if they don't). Maybe "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" isn't on as heavy a rotation as "Loveways" in our house, but we love it all the same. For nearly ten years, this Austin export has given us some of the most perfect 2-minute garage rock songs we know: the songs we put on after a late night out and dance around the house to when nobody's looking.
Quite traumatic it has been that we've managed to miss every single Spoon show in Seattle over the course of the past five years. To make up for it, we overkilled a bit this summer and saw three, most recently last night at the Showbox.
When you have suitcases full of solid, driving rock songs like Spoon does, it's hard to play a bad show. Last night's setlist was packed with tracks from the latest album, this year's "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" and its immediate predecessors "Gimme Fiction" and "Kill the Moonlight," but a few oldies made appearances: "Everything Hits At Once," "Chips & Dip" and, long-time favorite, the we-dare-you-not-to-dance-to-it "Quincy Punk Episode."
What we couldn't help but realize, though, was how young the crowd was! We're not going to get all "back in the day" on you, we actually think it's pretty wonderful, but we have to point it out because we're not that old and felt positively prehistoric last night. We won't give any numbers here, but if it's any indication, by the time we were born, the Emperor had already struck back ... believe us now?
To further our case, we're pretty sure we saw the Smoosh girls there last night and even they seemed ancient. But the band was smiling and rocking and playing requests all the same. Daniel even went out of his way to make the day/year of two of the teenage girls standing in front of us: handing a set list to one (she was with her dad, fyi) and gushing over the other's "Purple Rain" t-shirt. Which makes us love him even more; we were those girls once. We know. "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" will be their "Change My Life" and that's a credit to the band's perpetuity we're happy to gush about.
One additional bit of info divulged last night was that half of the band (Daniel and bassist Rob Pope) have left Austin and relocated to the Northwest (Portland and Seattle, respectively). We're hoping this means more local surprises in the same vein as Daniels' solo show this past May at the Crocodile. You know, intimate little gigs where we old folks can sway to selections from "A Series of Sneaks" and reminisce about, erm, 1998?
* Photo via Creative Commons, courtesy of forklift
