I said it in my review of their great 2022 release Lucifer on the Sofa, Spoon is more than one of the most consistent rock bands of the 21st Century. The most amazing proof of this? Kill the Moonlight, which turned 20 years old this month.

Coming after their first quintessential Spoon release, Girls Can Tell, Kill The Moonlight sees the Austinites clean their noir tendencies in the former record, and sounding more relaxed. At the same time, Britt Daniel, Jim Eno and company were carefully creating a sound for themselves, after being widely compared to Pixies, Pavement and many other alt-rock luminaries of the 80s and 90s.

Not only that, but after being dropped by Elektra after the release of A Series of Sneaks, Spoon started their streak of albums that cemented them as indie-rock most trusted outfits, starting with Girls Can Tell, and arguably peaking with Kill The Moonlight. This record packs a lot of unrelenting musicality, a showcase of the band’s rapport and reliability, and is one of the most succint summaries of Britt Daniel’s penchant for innocuous drama.

With its minor fame product of the groovy ‘The Way We Get By’ appearing in different TV shows at the time, the album was well-regarded, but by the end of the 00’s it was considered a major achievement and you could say it is now “critically acclaimed”. It’s funny, because even if Spoon has never put out a, to use current slang, ‘mid album’, Kill The Moonlight does stand out, even if it is the most stripped down of the band’s releases. Its predecessor with its dark sheen had outlined Spoon’s newfound purpose after signing with Merge. The other two Spoon albums from that decade aspired for more grandeur, and greater production values and were keener to indulge in pop sensibilities, all of this with success.

However, there’s an inevitable charm to listening to an album so sure of itself and solid that even a band as faithful to the past as Spoon could conjure to be simple in many senses. It’s all in the addictive, albeit short, melodies and grooves. The introduction of pianos to the band’s work is more than successful, they became an integral part of many of their future experiments. The layered intro of ‘Don’t Let It Get You Down’ is sweetly addictive; the raucous ‘Jonathan Fisk’ is an enjoyable rocker which highlights the talents of one of the most superb drummers this century has in Jim Eno. I think there’s not much left to say about how ‘Paper Tiger’ is one of the most celebrated songs by the band as it sees Spoon unshackling themselves about any preconception of their music.

After later albums, and especially the ones from the last decade, it is quite surprising that Spoon has stayed below that thin layer that separates indie-rock stalwarts from actually headlining festivals. This year they still appear only in the seventh line of the second day of the Corona Capital, Mexico’s biggest music festival, after already visiting a few times before, one of which was opening for Cage The Elephant (?). In a way Kill The Moonlight should be the argument against their amazing lack of exposure but is also maybe one of the reasons for it. The album’s stunning and inviting atmosphere is not immediate. It is enough to listen to the opener ‘Small Stakes’ a keyboard-only bop with an urgent rhythm and some chimes here and there while Britt sings about living an uneventful life. The schtick is not evident at first.

Of course, as in many records of their discography, Kill The Moonlight is filled with hooks, which compensate for the more esoteric passages, and eventually, elevated it to be considered Spoon’s magnum opus. Is it? To be concise, yes. In an output as consistent and bright as Spoon’s you can have a hard time stating something like that, but Kill The Moonlight’s spacious nature created a figurative space between itself and what came before and after. Every Spoon release is well received but they are not instant snapshots of their time that become fossils after a while. After twenty years it is impossible to argue against Kill The Moonlight‘s merits. The record is enjoyable and inviting, equally extroverted and humble, spacious and at the same time compact. Sounds difficult to explain? Why should I, then? Go listen to it, you gotta feel it.

 I took a river and the river was long
I want you to stay course, I want you to go
I took a river and the river was long and goes on

It goes on