Two of the veteran artists of Matador Records’ sizable roster, Spoon and Interpol, have teamed up for an expansive US tour entitled ‘Lights, Camera, Factions’. The pair of bands exist as a kind of Venn diagram, each with their own unmistakable sound you’d never confuse for the other, but with enough commonality and quality that there’s a wealth of middle ground where people will find much to love in both. It’s that center overlap that the LCF tour counts on, and judging by the huge crowd-gathered waterside in Providence by the time the sun has set, it was a gamble worth taking for all involved.
That said, the tour faced a bit of unexpected uncertainty when just a month prior to the run, scheduled opening act The Goon Sax dissolved, leaving both Spoon and Interpol searching for another suitable group of tourmates. Thankfully, New York’s Water From Your Eyes stepped in, providing a wide range of sound to start the night off – they’re stylistically impossible to pin down, and vocalist Rachel Brown delivers a tender ballad called ‘When You’re Around’ early on. But following that, the curtain comes off and the remainder of their set is firmly grounded in heavy electronica and drum & bass influence, augmented by a duo of guitarists generating strange sonic javelins that dash across the drum track, like Gilla Band or black midi crashed atop Mess-era Liars. Their final song is a nearly-ten-minute opus that starts and ends with Brown playing the kazoo.
When Spoon takes the stage, fronted by the genial Britt Daniel, they begin the night with the same track that opens their latest record, Lucifer on the Sofa. The track, ‘Held’, is in fact a cover of a song by Bill Callahan’s project Smog; it takes quite a bit to rework, match, and possibly even exceed a Callahan cut, especially one from one of his strongest albums, but Spoon’s amped-up rendition might just do all three. It doesn’t completely eschew the hypnotic nature of the original but raises up the bluesy riff that anchors the track to the fore, meshing it well with Daniel’s more animated, reverb-laden vocal and the heavier intermittent piano chords that punctuate the track.
Another new song from Lucifer that appears early in the night is ‘Wild’, also making excellent use of Alex Fischel’s piano, though in a much different way – here the notes are bright and underscore the forward-gazing nature of the song, reminiscent of a famous Rolling Stones song that also invoked a certain mythical fallen angel. ‘Wild’ is an instant Spoon classic in the way it captures a feeling: the sensation of crossing a rubicon into a wider world, the uncertainty and necessity of becoming one’s own person. The band’s catalog is replete with songs of this nature, leading to a situation where, while the band has individual songs that have burst out above the rest, no single disc dominates fans’ opinions as clear a favorite, as at every stage of their career they’ve been able to distill that vitality into song. They’re not post-anything; they’re a standard-bearer at the front of modern rock music, evoking its bluesy origins as well as the places it’s intersected with country, pop, and other genres throughout the years. They’ve existed for more than a generation, and have always made music that can resonate with people across any gap in age.
The staccato jabs of ‘Small Stakes’ soon melt into the bass-heavy, sultry lead of ‘Don’t You Evah’, technically another cover, this time of an NYC band called The Natural History. Between songs, Daniel turns to acknowledge “one of the sons of Rhode Island,” drummer Jim Eno, who hails from Warwick, all of ten minutes south of where they’re currently playing, lights of harborside houses from the city likely visible behind them down the Providence River. After some voice-morphing effects star in ‘My Mathematical Mind’, the band prepares a one-two salvo of songs that are, like ‘Wild’, part mission statement and part slice-of-life. The first is ‘The Way We Get By’, from early Spoon record Kill the Moonlight. It’s a tale of youth wrapped in pot smoke, impractical decisions, and – despite it all – a kind of sincerity that can’t help but mark that stage of life. It moves perfectly into ‘The Underdog’, perhaps the quintessential Spoon song, an excoriation of ignorance and arrogance led by Daniel on an acoustic guitar. The song itself was something of an underdog, made in a different recording session from the rest of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, its outlier status and differing production making it a candidate for exclusion. Instead, left on, it’s essentially become the band’s bespoke anthem on the level of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ – and the biggest singalong moment of the night.
Fischel and Daniel have another surprise up their sleeve during the second act, a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Isolation’ that begins with just the two of them onstage in narrow spotlights. They follow with ‘The Hardest Cut’, a bluesy stomper of a single sporting a mean riff that very much lives up to the title. Daniel tucks his hands into his pockets during ‘Inside Out’, one of the rarer Spoon songs that finds him only singing. From They Want My Soul, it stands as the most synth-driven piece of music they’ve ever made, awash in ethereal scales and a patient beat. Even at their most minimal and unconventional, Spoon is still at the peak of creativity, and with his newfound mobility, Daniel walks over to the right side of the stage and sings, knelt on the stage, to people on the barricade. They Want My Soul soundtracks the rest of the night as well, ending with the punchy ‘Rent I Pay’, one last opportunity for Daniel to raise his guitar up beside his head, strumming along as the organ, guitar, and drums all line up in the song’s pulsating heartbeat. Before he leaves the stage he lays his instrument down and jumps skyward. It’s a set so satisfying it’s almost hard to believe that the night still holds another titan of Matador Records to come.
Spoon’s dark, brooding, NYC-dwelling cousin, Interpol, are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their first record, Turn on the Bright Lights, which still remains in collective memory as one of the strongest debuts of all time. Along with 2004’s Antics, it cemented Interpol at the forefront of that decade’s post-punk resurgence, led by singer Paul Banks’ steely delivery and surreal lyricism. The word “angular” has come to be quite overused when discussing guitar patterns in the genre, but in their case, Interpol defined how the term is used in the contemporary sense, with songs like ‘PDA’ and ‘Say Hello to the Angels’ which light up and zig-zag all over. The band – which expands to five members while touring – plays mostly backlit by harsh red lights that cast them in silhouettes, a nod to the cover of TotBL, but occasionally a mirrorball mounted on the ground at the back of the stage comes alive to cast brilliant beams of light that paint constellations on the curtains surrounding the band and shoot out the front into the night.
Interpol are fresh off the release of The Other Side of Make-Believe, their seventh album, and it’s one of the main focus points of their set, including treating Providence to the first-ever live performance of ‘Mr. Credit’. Peppered in are older tracks, including the ‘Pioneer to the Falls’ from Our Love to Admire. While Interpol’s music is typically very active, the verses in this slower one leverages a forlorn guitar line for contrast, and the most captivating moment of the night is when Banks sings completely a cappella at the beginning of its final chorus, a lone shadowy figure surrounded by white light before a quiet rhythm from drummer Sam Fogarino ushers the song to its cinematic instrumental conclusion. Newer tracks like ‘All the Rage Back Home’ and ‘The Rover’ demonstrate how the band’s sound has grown and mutated through the years, while passages such as the dark, atonal turn in the breakdown of ‘The New’ remind all present just how ahead of their time the band were at the turn of the millennium.
For a final pairing, the band opts for the unrelenting ‘Slow Hands’ and then the tour debut of ‘Not Even Jail’, an Antics highlight with a bouncy bass line that crests in a proclamation of the titular phrase. It’s little surprises like this, and the live debut of a new track, that makes the prospect of seeing a favorite band live so exciting, and with a month or so left to go, Lights, Camera, Factions is proving to be an unmissable bill featuring some of the most enduring and inventive artists of the past twenty years.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
