For the past two years, I've made adamant assertions that Spoon is the Pavement of this decade. They're the two bands every indie kid can agree on. The two are both immediately recognizable and accessible. They cue emotion more like film directors than actual musicians, relying on a vision of inter-studio relationships more than musical talent.
Spoon undoubtedly lost votes on this list because they are so well-defined within their own infrastructure. They are entirely self-contained, leaving little room for interpretation and thus are not often recognized as having the broad impact on music a list like this seems to imply. If you look hard enough, however, you can see their influence in nearly every song on college radio stations, but it's too hard to accurately gauge their influence because it exists in the most remote areas of a band's sound. Definitive Spoon moments are often the barest, evoking as much visual stimuli as auditory.
Spoon introduced itself to the millennium at a second formative period in their history. Having just been dumped from their record label, the group met the loss with a poignant narrative that never actually told a story. The emptiness in their hearts became the emptiness on record, and they cut ties with their past by losing their Pixies, Sonic Youth and Wire influences. They were more barren, having taken sandpaper to the brash, punk persona until it became the smooth, pop entity most commonly associated with the group today.
That deceptively cookie-cutter persona is predicated on the fact that Spoon emotes a different kind of reflection. They don't treat their music as catharsis, but rather as a document of their cathartic behavior. On one of the decade's most perfect songs, Girls Can Tell's ""Anything You Want,"" lead singer Britt Daniel whimpers, ""If there's anything you want, come on back 'cause it's all still here / I'll be in the back room drinking my half of the beer."" What follows is the kind of resolution/retreat that is ostensibly happening in Daniel's back room, bouncing from optimism to fatalism with inebriated indecision.
And while the deep subject matter might seem compromising to their airy pop, it actually gets right to the heart of Spoon's definitive tone of masculinized romanticism. Their minimalism allows them to be one degree removed from everything, an isolated third party that can objectively weigh in on its own affairs. Daniel and Co. are merely vessels for romanticism, not attached directly enough to be considered emo, but close enough to the action to be able to dictate it accurately.
If Spoon has one downfall, it's that they make excellence predictable. Their standout album is a purely subjective statement, as any can be defended well enough to justify the claim. From 2002's looser, more freewheeling Kill the Moonlight to 2005's more mysterious Gimme Fiction and 2007's hearty and buoyant Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon has solidified itself as the musical leader in ephemeral extrapolations. They corner the nuances of a ""Little Japanese Cigarette Case,"" the rousing tale of ""The Underdog"" and the futile securities of a ""Paper Tiger"" with equal grace and ease.
But beyond their mastery of music in the moment, what makes Spoon such a relevant and consequential group in this decade is their crossover appeal. They get played on everything from Top 40 to adult contempo to college radio stations without seeming disingenuous or passé to any crowd. Without any active attempt at unification, Spoon integrates vast brackets of citizens under one simple, profound umbrella the way Pavement reunited hordes of disinterested, unaffected pop fans in the '90s. Between their mass appeal and dependably brilliant output, Spoon belongs at the forefront of the decade's pantheon of excellence.
