Spoon

Best INDIE ACT in NATIONAL

 

Austin’s scrupulous songsmiths Spoon were flirting with mainstream success for a decade before their better-late-than-never commercial breakthrough happened last year with their sixth album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, which debuted at number 10 on the Billboard 200. Appearances on SNL and Letterman followed. After their April show at the MFA’s 400-capacity Remis Auditorium, frontman Britt Daniel told me it was their first time headlining a seated venue; eight months later, they were packing the Orpheum. Still, they remain an indie band in the true sense of the term — they’ve been signed to the independent label Merge since 2000, after a brief, disastrous stint with Elektra. And Ga Ga is no sellout attempt at stardom. If anything, Spoon keeps getting weirder. Take “The Ghost of You Lingers,” the only instrumentation on which is a repeating eighth-note pattern, the “ga ga ga ga ga” of the album’s title. Incidental studio sounds abound. They flirt with unsettling dub mixing techniques. With a couple exceptions — the Motown-y “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” and the Van Morrison–inspired, Jon Brion–produced single “The Underdog” — the songs are stripped down to their bare essentials. As Daniel told me, “You want to have some sort of focal point on each track and then have something that makes each song special and make that what people walk away with.” It’s what the band has been doing for years — but now, a lot more people are walking away with that Spoon something.

— Will Spitz

Runners-up
1. Band of Horses
2. Of Montreal
3. Animal Collective