Results tagged “spoon”

On a particularly desperate TV day, try tuning into The Main on Food Network Canada, and you might find yourself wondering why the hell Spoon licensed their song "I Turn My Camera On" to be used as its theme. And then you'll realize that—gasp!—it isn't a Spoon song at all, just a song with pretty much the same beat, hook, and vocal line (no biggie).

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.

Each weekday morning, we pick a recent image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve!

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.

If nothing else, we like two things at Torontoist: the TTC, and bands about spoons. But before there was Spoon, one of the best bands currently making music (and certainly the best one out of Austin, Texas) there was The Spoons, a new-wave band coming straight from the hip and edgy streets of...Burlington. The band enjoyed some short-lived success in the 1980s, especially on the college circuit, and fizzled out as the decade came to an end.

In the year that the popularity of the ringtone might have outweighed the popularity of the single, Toronto-I-S-T comes up with the top ten songs that mattered in 2005.

I'm *sixeyes. I'm back. And Torontoist is sick of radio. The kind of )... Torontoist could go on, but that would be redundant (but it does feel good). Yeah, Torontoist just noticed that all the c.r.a.p. referenced was female... oh, but there are some 'males' who terrorize radio as well. Tim McGraw ("Live Like You Were Dying"... this is Celine Dion on steroids... not an improvement), Daniel Powter ("Bad Day" or is it "Had A Bad Day"... whenever he unleashes one of his oooooohowwwooohowww's Torontoist has to think, 'Oh, so that's what a squirrel sounds like when it's run over). There are many more, it's just that Torontoist doesn't recognize who these guys are and therefore can't make fun of them.

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

It's a question that comes up on almost a nightly basis: Where can athletic supporters hear the best whorish pop and classic hip-hop? Well, consider tomorrow night a no-brainer. Several Eye writers, including but not limited to Dave "D-Mo" Morris, will be playing an athletic supporter-centric mix of Run DMC, J.Timberlake, Spoon, Serge G., X-Tina, tatu, Public Enemy, De La Soul and so much more. Starts at 8PM TOMORROW night at a little place we like to call The Underdown (263 Gerrard St. E.).

Mixtape:

Last week, Torontoist was criticized for the inclusion of an Ol' Dirty Bastard song for the second time in the short run of our mixtape series. If this were a few years ago, Torontoist would have probably responded to the fairly legitimate beef by posting only ODB Mp3's today. But that was us then. Now, we take a cue from the populist French leader Jacques Chirac and take a more diplomatic approach to the problem. This week le Mercredi Mixtape offers no ODB, but rather a wide range of music that should satisfy the most diverse tastes. Voila: