The Trouble Tone
Spoon “Everything Hits At Once”
The radio got totally intolerable last night while I was driving home from work, so I needed a change. I put in Girls Can Tell, Austin rockers Spoon’s moody and marvelous 2000 return to the indie world after an ill-fated sojourn into the indifferent arms of Neglektra Elektra. I ended up kinda just listening to “Everything Hits At Once,” the album opener, on repeat. (Yeah, you got me, at first it was all about that “lights in traffic we become/on the way back home” line.)
I notice that I focus a lot on lyrics–which are easier to pick apart in that “what is a song but poetry set to music” way, especially for a words guy like me–to the exclusion of talking about the actual, you know, music. Sometimes it’s really hard to get past the rockcrit mad libs: [stock adj] [instrument] (e.g., “swirling organ,” “jangly guitar,” “booming drums”) or “sounds like [band 1] meets [thing 2].”
So today, one and a half instrumental things that surprised me about “Everything Hits At Once,” and one and half that didn’t.
The Trouble Tone: If you’d've asked me what the very first sound on this song is, I would’ve said, “Easy. The drums kick in, ‘bish-dum-dum-doo-dat.’ ” But really, a split second earlier, a really quiet synth drone comes in, and maintains that chord for the song’s first 30 seconds or so. (It might go on longer, but I lose it around the half-minute mark.)
That the presence of this sound is a revelation to me speaks to either (1) my listening so often on shitty computer speakers, (2) my habit of listening while distracted by some other task or (3) that hole in my head everybody keeps talking about.
Anyway, as the song gets going, the bass moves and some brighter keyboards alternate between a couple chords. But that static drone in the background hangs, somber, creating unease like the sound of distant sirens. It’s super-subtle, but it’s alerting yr animal brain that this isn’t necessarily a happy time coming up.
Dreamtime Solo: Britt Daniel, the main Spooner, has always had an inventive touch with guitar solos, at times ending up just this side of out–blasting minimal skronk or tearing off figures that are more rhythmic in character than shreddy or melodic. Solos become little detours and tangents in Spoon songs.
Elements of this approach translated to the mellotron solo, played by one of the dudes from Trail of Dead, that starts around 2:16. “Everything Hits At Once” goes all the sudden from being lean and dark to turning lush and weird and starry-eyed.
Skins: I love the way Spoon places the drums in their mixes. They’ve figured out a consistent sweet spot where you really feel and hear what the drums are doing, but they don’t overpower the song, while the overall sound remains streamlined and clutter-free. As a result, they’re one of the few rock bands who have sat out the overcompression/loudness wars but nonetheless make songs that can sit next to a hip hop track in yr party shuffle without sounding weak.
In “Everything Hits At Once” you get a steady, nuanced performance from sticksman Jim Eno. It sounds like a real drummer doing his thing in a room (this is rarer than you think), booms loud and clear enough to really move the song, and has accents that actually, you know, seem to accentuate the feel and meaning of the song.
(And OK, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks: I find the refrain “I go to sleep and think that yr next to me” to be a perfectly succinct encapsulation of the post-breakup desolate devastation blues as I remember them; and the concept of fading into the sea of rush hour cars as a kind of communion is mystifying.)
Please enjoy the computerized rotoscope magic of Divya Srinivasan’s video for this song. It’s got parts that are lean and dark and lush and weird and starry-eyed, so it’s kind of perfect.
Girls Can Tell at Target. (and at iTunes.)
Spoon “The Book I Write”