Spoon's nano-rock

I'm not a music theorist and can't really explain this 100% to my satisfaction, but I think there's something very interesting happening in Spoon's music that isn't very present in most modern music, especially in the rock/indie rock pigeonhole, which is where they are usually categorised. So please bear with me and feel free to comment if you have another opinion.

What is it that makes Spoon different from the other 10,000 indie rock bands in America? My feeling is that it's something that happens at an almost molecular level, or, if we see the beat, the pulse as the smallest unit of rock music, it's the nano level. How does that happen?

A few weeks ago I got the change to find out in the flesh, when I went to see Spoon live. And what a show it was. I arrived with very high expectations and they were more than fulfilled. Well into their second decade, the band continue to hone their unique take on leftfield rock, crafting a sound that mixes dub inflexions with angular new wave sounds. But describing what they do as a mere mixing and matching is wholly insufficient. Because it seems to me that Spoon have managed to rebuild rock from the ground up, taking the lessons of dub and dancefloor music and applying them at the most basic level of their sound: the bass and the beat.

In jazz innovation has always begun with the rhythm section - the great breakthroughs of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were all predicated on the interplay of the double bass and drums. Spoon's Rob Pope (bass) and Jim Eno (drums) do a similar thing with rock, whittling down the cage of 4/4 time to the singular pulse that is their signature sound. The result is a style which is minimalist, funky and inflected. Rather than plastering "dance" affectations over a standard rock track, it is this syncopated base motif that generates their subtle, swinging, but nevertheless rock-steady groove. A good example of this is I turn my camera on from the album Gimme Fiction

On top of this rhythm comes a pared-down take on indie rock, mirroring the pulsing substratum to the extent that it sometimes is reminiscent of both dance music and John Adams or Steve Reich. Put another way, they like staying on the same note for a long time; alternatively, individual figures are stretched and distorted through dub effects resulting in a similar trancelike repetition. The final touch is provided by Britt Daniel's vocals which can range from falsetto-pure to raw and emotional, and deliver often laconic and fragmentary lyrics.

And while the lyrics are sometimes of themselves oblique, their treatment as part of the overall sound further underlines their oneness with the sound, because they are distorted, arbitrarily cut off and otherwise manipulated just like the rest of the music. So you can leave your cigarette lighters in your pockets.

And that's maybe where Spoon also differ from their rock contemporaries. Most indie bands (take Sigur Ros, Fleet Foxes or Tocotronic) or their stadium equivalents (Coldplay, Radiohead) write songs that function on a rhetorical level, building up instrumentation, vocals and emotions in an architectural manner, creating an affective and narrative arc from the song's start to its end. Spoon songs don't usually work this way: the effect is immediate, the sound swallows you, the mood doesn't build in any architectonic sense; instead, as in dance music it circulates, brews and diffuses.