silence kit #20

Spoon
Kill The Moonlight [Merge, 2002]

For quite a while I have associated Kill The Moonlight with the underrated Will Ferrell vehicle Stranger Than Fiction, which features quite a fair bit of music by Spoon. These past few weeks though, I’m slowly thumbing my way through the hinterlands of cartoonist Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown series and his Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid In The World graphic novel and the suburban pop songs from Kill The Moonlight seems to be motioning along with Ware’s marginalized characters from one flat-toned comic frame to the next. That’s the way we get by, indeed. What’s unmistakable too is how the songs serve the purpose of caricaturizing the minute details of my own desiccated existence: my allergy to revoltingly arduous work, the melancholic pancakes on the breakfast plate, mornings hopelessly gray, the big innovation on the minimum wage. Musically, Kill The Moonlight is where Spoon’s current modus operandi precipitated in the haunting echo-drenched basement outbursts of “Small Stakes” and “Paper Tiger”, Britt Daniel’s barbed beatboxing on “Stay Don’t Go”, the startling futuristic heft of “Vittorio E”, their songcraft further sharpened on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (2007). Don't let it get you down.