Results tagged “brittdaniel”

Spoon have made only one big misstep in their ten-plus years of recording albums: Gimme Fiction. The 2005 album, a follow-up to 2002's absolutely brilliant Kill the Moonlight, marked a step backward for the band's music and a step forward for its accessibility––an album of decent, friendly, straightforward, catchy, and ultimately forgettable rock songs, an album able to retain the band's old fans while hooking tons of new ones. Gimme Fiction––save for (pictured) lead singer Britt Daniel's fantastic voice––sounded like some band aping Spoon, and not doing all that great of a job at it.

At the end of the second verse of one of Bright Eyes' new songs, "Reinvent The Wheel"—a eulogy for a dead musical idol, possibly Elliott Smith—lead singer Conor Oberst laments to his fallen hero that "you never understood what we loved you for." Coming as the line does in the song, with guitar chords and drums emphatically struck together to highlight Oberst's voice and the backing vocals, the moment is both uplifting and tragic, a beautiful example of the ambivalence and catharsis that runs through much of Bright Eyes' work. But standing in the Opera House at the band's concert last night, surrounded by an ocean of half-drunk couples with side-bangs awkwardly making out, half-pretty under-aged girls wondering when the slow sad songs were going to start, and most of the rest of us just wondering when it was going to get good, it was hard not to feel that Oberst's lyrics lamenting the misunderstanding of a crowd's love might very well apply to him.

A look at some choice live music going down over the next week: