26.) Spoon - Kill the Moonlight (2002)


When a band becomes one of your favorites, it's impossible to forget your first time. For me, Kill The Moonlight was my first Spoon and it marked the beginning of a truly fruitful musical relationship.

Everyone pretty much agrees that Kill the Moonlight is a pretty flawless record. I mean, right? Does anyone object to this. As the relatively minimalist opener "Small Stakes" gives way to what could be the best Spoon single eva - the genius pop sing along "The Way We Get By", the Spoon listening universe must have all turned to one another and said "yes please".

Kill the Moonlight was a watershed record for me in that, as I said earlier, it started me on this band Spoon who would become a band I would follow absolutely anywhere. I say right here and right now, I will purchase every single Spoon record until there stops being Spoon records and ten or fifteen years from now when these records get reissued, I'll probably buy them.

There was something about Kill the Moonlight that made me dive all in almost immediately. The starkness of the record was shocking. Again, Spoon are minimalist almost to a fault. They're doing a whole lot on these songs but it doesn't feel like they're doing very much at all. Take "Paper Tiger", there's the piano, the shudder, the light precussion, probably a guitar and Britt. But, it's a beautiful song. I hadn't heard pop music that sounded like this. At least none that I could remember. I was entranced by Kill the Moonlight - it's so effortlessly likable, but it probably shouldn't be. It's an art-rock record, but Spoon had the brains to construct these songs so that their pretentions fall away and are virtually unnoticeable.

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