The first time I heard Spoon, I was less than impressed. Britt Daniel's voice lacks range and power, the production was sloppy, the musicianship adequate at best, and in general, I thought they might have promise, but if this was the future of indie rock, I wasn't signing on. A few weeks later, I went to see them at the Black Cat here in Wasington, DC and, while its an intimate club, the acoustics of a big open room did nothing for their sound, making everything basically the same volume. And that should have been it for Spoon.

But I still had Kill the Moonlight on my mp3 player and occasionally a song would come on and I'd find myself turning it up, not realizing that it was another song by Spoon. Time and again, I would check just what was playing on the mp3 player and discover it was another Spoon song, which I would invariably rate high. Then I imported my iTunes database into Access, did some manipulation and discovered that in the great scheme of things, I had rated enough songs from Kill the Moonlight to put it in my top 50 albums. How the hell did that happen? So I sat down and listened to the album from the beginning and discovered that I liked Britt Daniel's strange vocal delivery (a combination of falsetto and rock sneer), the raw production made things more immediate, and while the musicianship might have only been adequate, it was pretty amazing what they could accomplish with repeated sounds and phrasing.

Take, for example, the fifth song on the album, "Jonathan Fisk." The guitar part is simply three chords repeatedly strummed in an eighth-note patter, with the drum keeping time on beats 2 and 4 with the snare. The power of the song comes from the extra fill around this, but that eighth-note, 2 and 4 keeps up throughout the entire song. It's like something Philip Glass would have written had he been a disaffected guitarist instead of a brooding pianist. Similarly is the repeated synth pattern on "Small Stakes," with the lyrics providing the needed counterpart to the endless repeated 4 measure pattern. Even more striking is the use of a vocal sound loop (a la Bobby McFerrin) that provides the rhythm for "Stay Don't Go."

My favorite song on the album has to be "The Way We Get By," which also features a repeated phrase, this time done on an acoustic piano. It sounds simple on the recording, but even after I got the sheet music for it, I discovered that sometimes it's more difficult to play the simple thing than the difficult. "The Way We Get By" probably has the best vocal on the record, as Daniel's range is never strained here, and his sometimes strange delivery provides the right note for the lyrics, which, to be frank, are simply an exaltation of drug use.

For its simplicity, no two songs on this album sound exactly the same. That is, each song changes the instrumentation or effects somehow. Nothing matches the hard hitting acoustic piano of "Someone Something," or the echoing notes that characterize the entirely of "Paper Tiger," or the synth sound of "Small Stakes." In this, Spoon does Talking Heads one better, who managed to vary their overall sound between albums, rather than between songs. Of course, the differences between the songs are not as marked, but they are differentiated. In addition, there remains some recording artifacts such as the false start on "Vittorio E.," the maniacal laughter that precedes "Back to the Life," or the moaning and back-chatter at the beginning of "Jonathan Fisk." Rather than seeming amateurish, those bits make the songs seem more "live," even though these are studio recordings.

I tend to like the early half of this album more than the latter half, as it moves from the fast eighth-note repeating songs to more introspective, slower quarter-note patterns in the second half. Still, it's a surprising record. Listening to it once again for this review, I was struck by how much piano and synthesizer it contains, which is fairly rare in indie rock circles, which tend to concentrate around the traditional garage band sound of guitar, bass and drums (or, in the case of The White Stripes and The Black Keys, just guitar and drums). The other thing that is surprising is how much use is made of horns, typically an alto-sax part that provides the extra ooomph that compels the chorus (such as in "You Gotta Feel It"). You get a little tired of Daniel's use of reverb every once and awhile, and sometimes the sounds are simply eclectic for eclectic's sake (also a fair criticism of some of Wilco's celebrated Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Aimee Mann's Lost in Space, both released around the same time, so it must have been in the water). At the end, though, you're struck by just how different this album is--and how good it is.