Notes From The Front, November 7, 2002

If you don't listen to hip-hop, this analogy probably won't mean anything to you, but I think of Kill The Moonlight as an analog to The Low-End Theory, A Tribe Called Quest's album from 1991. Spoon and their producer John Croslin did a very similar favor for indie rock and indie rockers to the one Ali Shaheed Muhammad did for hip-hop in the early Nineties. Whether other rockers pick up on the Spoon model the way rappers picked up on Quest's remains to be seen.

If you remember, by the turn into the Nineties, Bomb Squad production had taken over hip-hop. The standard "serious" hip-hop production sounded like Public Enemy: there was a big sample filling out the midrange, and all this high screetchy stuff that sounded like car alarms or sirens over the top, and after "Bring The Noise" and Snap, we were up to something like 140+ BPS for radio songs. The rapper had to compete with all this activity just to be heard. That was okay if you were Chuck D, and you were working with a basso profundo voice, or if you were Eazy-E and you were basically just hollering. But if you were out for something subtler, your only alternative was to try to match the abrasiveness of the production and cross your fingers that something in your performance communicated your ambivalence.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad probably didn't set out to do anything revolutionary; he probably just figured "hmm, I have these two emcees on my hands who don't shout, how can I foreground what they do well?" So Quest stripped out most of the midrange, made the high-range more trippy and atmospheric, and jacked up the bass to heretofore unexplored reaches of prominence and expressiveness. This freed up space for Phife and Q-Tip to be tremendously communicative while remaining essentially conversational; they could do that because they weren't competing with the midrange instruments that cut into vocal frequencies. So Tip established himself as the ultimate laid-back emcee, the musical vibe was drugged out and cool, the bass was huge and satisfied the need for abrasiveness, and the rest is history. The Low-End Theory changed the face of hip-hop.

I think that over the course of his recording career, Britt Daniel probably came to a similar conclusion to the one Ali Shaheed Muhammad did on behalf of Q-Tip and Phife. Modern indie rock demands a big, frequency-spectrum saturating rhythm guitar to fill the midrange and beyond. That's great if you're Steven Malkmus or the guy from American Hi-Fi, or if you're okay with your vocal being little more than a faint trail through a wilderness of sound, but what if you're actually a good singer? You play around in the studio, and you can't help but notice that your performance sounds larger and has more impact if you start taking the rhythm guitars away. Slowly it must have dawned on Daniel that the extra midrange wattage was unneccessary.

In many of the interviews I read with Britt Daniel after Girls Can Tell, he said he'd been listening to a lot of Stax-Volt and Motown, rather than indie rock. I didn't really hear it on that record (except for "Take The Fifth"), but I now recognize Girls Can Tell as the sound of a guy figuring out what he wanted to do. "Take The Fifth" became the blueprint for what would become Daniel's approach: Archie Bell & The Drells-type beat, a rubbery bass and kick drum groove, trippy high-range ear candy instruments handled as if they were samples, creative use of a simple and insistent piano phrase, guitars for shading rather than crunch, and postmodern soul-man vocals. While I couldn't argue that "Take The Fifth" was the best song on Girls Can Tell, for me, it stood out immediately as the collection's most interesting track.

So I was pleased to find that Kill The Moonlight extends the internal logic of "Take The Fifth" over the balance of an entire album. Daniel lets you know where he's going right off the bat: "I don't dig the Stripes, but I go for Har Mar". No abrasive, guitar-driven garage rock here, instead, this is going to be an album beholden to R&B and groove pop idioms. Spoon has always been blessed with outstanding rhythm section players -- but this is the first record where Daniel really trusts them enough to allow them to carry the songs. Something like "Stay Don't Go" would have been impossible on prior records, and it's still pretty remarkable that a flower that fragile can exist outside greenhouse conditions in 2002. Ditto for the amazing "Back To The Life", which is just super-trippy. But the whole record is wispy, lace-veiled, impressioninstic, it creates a totality of feel and experience that's uncommon during a song-driven and wattage-driven period. It's got a sonic vocabulary.

I've never really though much of Daniel as a writer. I think he sometimes leans toward coherence, but is usally too fragmented to hit the mark. As an author of hook-driven pop songs, he's okay, nothing special, right around Matthew Sweet level. What distinguishes his project is his uncanny rhythm sense, his willingness to take arrangement chances, his idiosyncratic voice, and his skill as a nuanced singer. Daniel found a means to highlight his strengths by eliminating all the conventional production choices that got in the way of their expression.

Indie rock in 2002 is in much worse shape than hip-hop was in '91. The basic approach now is to get two and sometimes even three loud guitars upfront in every mix, and a singer disgorging his lungs ("emotionally") over the top. It can be straight-out unlistenable, and in any case, the genre appears to have lost sight of the central arrangement axiom that's been at the heart of rock since the Fifties -- the drummer handles the accelerator and the brakes, the bass player steers, and the singer navigates. Everybody else is just backseat driving. Kill The Moonlight offers a way forward for indie rockers, a way out of the cul-de-sac of testosterone it's been driven into.

 

Grab the microphone, and let your words rip.