LOOSE FUR
Loose Fur
Drag City
SPOON
Kill the Moonlight
Merge
Spoon and Jeff Tweedy’s side-project Loose Fur have much in common. Both have ended up on the short end of the major-label whacking stick (Spoon was dropped by Warner after one album, Tweedy’s Wilco after three). Both have bit back at the hand that fed, releasing their subsequent albums to critical praise and ensuring their inclusion on many Album of the Year lists.
Stylistically, however, their current projects could not be more dissimilar. On Kill the Moonlight, Spoon explore simplicity, while on Loose Fur, Tweedy and Jim O’Rourke simply explore.
Loose Fur is not a band per se. Born out of Tweedy and O’Rourke’s collaboration on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (an album that marked a decidedly different direction for the band, thanks in no small part to O’Rourke’s production), Loose Fur is a one-off that allows Tweedy to pursue his burgeoning experimental side and O’Rourke to hone his pop sensibilities. Fortunately, the end result avoids the pitfalls that some expected of this project – namely an emotionless exploration of art and rock.
Loose Fur opens strong and peaks early. "Laminated Cat" (a.k.a. "Not For the Season," a staple of Wilco’s live set) is a seamless meld of Tweedy’s folk-pop and O’Rourke’s atonal abstractions. The track climaxes with a throbbing bass line that anchors it solidly to the ground as the rest of the song collapses into disarray around it – the song is musical entropy at its best. The album falters somewhat on the third track, "So Long," which is marked by assorted crashes, clicks and splays of noise that would normally accompany a dropped guitar. "So Long" is what some fans feared that this project would become – noise for the sake of noise. Nevertheless, the band quickly regains its composure, and the album plays itself out with a trio of pleasantly tweaked pop songs.
Spoon takes a drastically different approach on Kill the Moonlight, subscribing fully to the notion that "less is more." Gone is the studio-slick lounge groove that informed 2001’s Girls Can Tell. Kill the Moonlight has very few wasted notes – every handclap, piano plink and synthesizer twitter is decidedly in its place. Clocking in at 35 minutes, there is no room here for the throwaway filler or extraneous solos that accompany many otherwise strong albums.
This is not to say that any part of Kill the Moonlight is either overly calculated or bereft of spontaneity – quite the contrary. The uncluttered arrangements merely serve to illustrate the strength of the songs themselves – from the choppy Wire-esque groove of the opener "Small Stakes" to the Generation X pre-punk chug of "Jonathan Fisk," Spoon carries this album with a confident indie-rock swagger. Think Guided By Voices if you cleaned ’em up, fed them a pot of coffee and convinced them to actually finish a song – in an actual studio.
The album closes with the lush, wall-of-sound splendour of "Vittorio E.," probably the closest thing to a ballad that you will get from a band like Spoon. Owing more to Spiritualized than to any of their indie-rock counterparts, "Vittorio E." proves that Spoon can succeed equally well when they let it all hang out. Kill the Moonlight is one of those few albums that you wish was longer.
LOOSE FUR 3/5
SPOON 4/5
RYAN ELLIS
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