Spoon Digs Into Crowd at Avalon

These days, the audience alone is entertaining enough to justify the price of admission for most “indie rock” shows. Tight denim, prized thrift shop finds, and purposefully mussed-up hairdos adorned the high school girls and forty-something hipsters alike at last weekend’s Spoon concert at the Avalon in Boston.

Known best for their spare sound and danceable backbeats, the foursome from Texas delivered on both counts, mixing most of the songs on their recent “Gimme Fiction” LP, with at least one song from each of their past releases.

Luckily for all, Spoon did not fail their ever-so-trendy minions, delivering an earnest collection of new and old favorites that owed its occasional hollowness not to the spirit of the band but to the acoustics of the venue.

The band began the set with a progression of older songs, to the warm response of an audience understandably acquainted more with recent hit singles. Both parties seemed much more comfortable once the band brooded into the well-delivered “The Beast and Dragon Adored,” the opening song on “Fiction” and a prime example of the band’s tense build-up and singer Britt Daniel’s dynamic range and suppressed lyrical sensuality.

The audience didn’t have to wait too long to get what they wanted, however, and when the climax finally came, Daniel and company made it last for the rest of the night. As soon as drummer Jim Eno began to hammer in the intro to “I Turn My Camera On,” the crowd howled in unison and commenced the shoulder-driven dancing the beautiful song demands. With crowd energy at a maximum, Spoon raged through a sizeable chunk of “Fiction” that included their most recent hit, “The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine.”

Following this loveable drag-jangle with “The Way We Get By,” the song that single-handedly put Spoon, at least temporarily, on the mainstream radar screen (with an article in Time magazine), and pounding out “Sister Jack” right after that constituted the best one-two knockout the band had to offer and whipped the fans up as close to a frenzy as they could get without spilling their over-sized Budweisers. The band’s decision to bang out their biggest ammunition in the middle of the set paid off, as it kept the audience energized through more mood-driven songs like “Me & The Bean.”

Having danced around precariously to “I Turn My Camera On” in the confines of my car this summer, I was used to enjoying Spoon’s energy in a relatively small space, letting the driving drum and bass fill in and envelop me. The Avalon’s cavernous ceilings and multiple levels allowed some of this intimate power to escape up to the rafters, rendering some songs, especially anxiously sparse songs like “The Infinite Pet,” a little less soulful than they seem from within the cab of a 1992 Mazda pickup.

This was no fault of Spoon’s, and they certainly managed to convey a great deal of their enjoyment to the audience. Turning around often to smile and communicate with Eno, the band members operated as a well-oiled machine, cohesive in the way bands that lack extravagant individual virtuosos have to be. The band showcased their best qualities, namely Daniel’s likeable vocal approach and on the alternating use of slow climax and simple backbeats (although he had a full kit, Eno could have done the same job with just snare, bass, and hi-hat).

Sometimes sounding like art-pop legends 10cc covering Prince, and other times sounding completely themselves, Spoon delivered all the fun their fad-clad audience could’ve hoped for. Doing as much as Modest Mouse and others to blur the lines between what is respectably indie and guiltily radio-friendly, Daniel and company are helping to usher in a new era that will hopefully win back the radio from cookie cutter hip hop. Maybe the artfully unkempt throng of Spoonophiles is on to something; no one can deny creativity this infectiously accessible forever.

—Staff writer Henry M. Cowles can be reached at hmcowles@fas.harvard.edu.