MRG Live Presents: SPOON - LUCIFER ON THE SOFA TOUR
MRG Live Presents: SPOON - LUCIFER ON THE SOFA TOUR
Event Details
Date
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Time
Doors: 7:00 PM - Show: 8:00 PM
Age Restriction
All Ages
Venue
Coors Event Centre
Address
241 2 Ave S, Saskatoon, Saskatoon, SK
About the Event
Doors 7:00 Show 8:00 PM
Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years – both in and out of lockdown – these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color.
From the detuned guitars anchoring “The Hardest Cut,” to the urgency of “Wild," to the band’s blown-out cover of the Smog classic “Held,” Lucifer on the Sofa bottles the physical thrill of a band tearing up a packed room. It’s an album of intensity and intimacy, where the music’s harshest edges feel as vivid as the directions quietly murmured into the mic on the first-take. According to frontman Britt Daniel, “It’s the sound of classic rock as written by a guy who never did get Eric Clapton.”
While Spoon’s last album, Hot Thoughts (2017), bristled with drum machines, synths, and astral moods, the nonstop touring that followed in its wake tugged the band back toward a stripped-down sound. “I liked where we’d gone on Hot Thoughts – it had a specific style and it covered new ground for us – but we kept noticing on the road that the live versions of the songs were beating the album versions,” says Daniel. “And it got us thinking: The best rock music is not about dialing in the right patches and triggering samples. It’s about what happens in a room.”
It took some relocating. In fall of 2019, Daniel moved back to Austin from Los Angeles. A month later, guitarist/keyboardist Alex Fischel followed him with a car full of gear. The move to Texas added up for a lot of reasons: Daniel was born and grew up there, and his family never left. Drummer Jim Eno has his Public Hi-Fi studio in Austin, which allowed the band the luxury of recording at whatever pace they liked. Above all, regrouping in Austin would help the band break with the sound and the feeling of the last few Spoon albums.
That return felt like less of a homecoming than a jolt to the system. Here was an opportunity to write amidst the creative lawlessness that inspired Daniel to make music in the first place — a city where everything from outlaw country to psychedelic punk have long co-mingled at honky-tonks, house shows and backyard barbecues.
“We wanted to make a record where we could experience and draw from a scene,” says Daniel. “Where Alex and I could write all day, then go out and see Dale Watson at the Continental, then come back home and write some more.”
That scene would yield everything from the scorch and bite of “The Hardest Cut,” the first song written by Daniel and Fischel after returning to Texas, (“I spent a lot of 2018 and 2019 listening to ZZ Top,” Daniel explains), to the gentle dizziness of “Astral Jacket,” a ballad tracked after a night out at the now-shuttered Austin nightspot, Stay Gold. Bathed in atmosphere, it’s the sound of coming down – meandering Wurlitzer, brushed drums, and the thump of a timpani suspended in predawn stillness.
Working alongside producer/engineer Mark Rankin (Adele, Queens of the Stone Age) – and with contributions from Dave Fridmann and Justin Raisen – the band’s strategy was straightforward. “I’d come in with a couple new songs and instead of piecing it together like we did the last one, we said ‘Let's rehearse it’,” Daniel says. “Let’s play it in this room over and over til it becomes something. And let’s just do it with as few instruments as we can.”
Halfway through the recording process, the pandemic hit. The studio shut down, but Daniel continued writing. “There are songs I wrote last spring [of 2020] that I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise,” he says. “It was that first-of-its-kind moment."
The album’s title track snapshots a late night walk through downtown Austin during shutdown, steeped in the eerie dissonance of isolation and intimacy. Daniel explains: “I didn’t know where that image came from but it felt right, this idea of Satan sitting with me on my couch, staring at me. But after the song was written I figured out that the Lucifer on the sofa is the worst you can become – the bitterness, or lack of motivation or desperation that keeps you down and makes you do nothing or self-indulge. So it’s a song about the battle between yourself and that character you can become, the conflict being played out through a long night walk through downtown Austin.”
It’s also the song where the colors change, the lights turn down and the rules of the record go out the window, the way last songs on a record sometimes do. "It was always gonna be the last song. It wouldn’t have fit anywhere else,” says Daniel.
When the band reconvened in October, Daniel had a new batch of songs, and a fresh sense of momentum. “It’s certainly something we didn't take for granted, that feeling of being in a room with each other,” Daniel says. “That moment was a once in a lifetime kind of feeling.”
Lucifer on the Sofa is the sound of that moment, a record of defiant optimism, the sound of a band cracking things open and letting them spill out onstage. At a time fraught with uncertainty, it’s shutting the door on the devil you know and never looking back.
- Andrea Domanick
Important Information
Spoon
One of indie rock's most critically acclaimed acts, Spoon have earned a reputation for being consistently inventive and inventively consistent. They arrived as brash post-punkers in the post-grunge lull of the mid-'90s, but in the decade that followed, Spoon truly came into their own. On 2001's Girls Can Tell and 2002's Kill the Moonlight, they stripped rock down to its most essential elements, then used the empty space that remained to play with shifting rhythms, taut guitars and literate lyrics in ways that sounded innovative and timeless.
This heady blend of precision punk and serpentine classic rock (the band has drawn comparisons to everyone from the Pixies and Sonic Youth to Elvis Costello and Tom Petty) eventually earned Spoon commercial success as well as glowing reviews: Their 2007 album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, was a top 10 hit in the U.S.. Over the years, the band continued to evolve while remaining true to their minimalist roots. They opened up their sound on 2017's dance-tinged Hot Thoughts, then went back to basics with the raw rock of 2022's Lucifer on the Sofa, both of which exemplified how Spoon found new ways of doing what they've always done. Spoon was formed in Austin, TX in 1993 by singer/guitarist Britt Daniel and drummer Jim Eno, who met during their time in the band Alien Beats.
Taking their name from a Can song, Spoon's debut EP Nefarious appeared on the small Texas imprint Fluffer Records in May 1994. The band signed to Matador the following year, and issued their first full-length Telephono in April 1996. Produced by the Reivers' John Croslin and recorded in his garage studio for $3,000, the album reached number 35 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart, while its noisy, hooky take on post-punk drew favorable comparisons to Pixies and Wire. Daniel and Eno added bassist Josh Zarbo (formerly of the local band Maxine's Radiator) to the fold in 1997, and honed in on the tight, minimalist pop that became Spoon's forte with that year's Soft Effects EP.
In 1998, the band began a brief and tumultuous stint on Elektra Records, who released Spoon's second album A Series of Sneaks that May. Once again, the album earned favorable reviews, but its sales were disappointing to Elektra, which was in the midst of an internal company shake-up at the time. Four months after the album's release, the label dropped Spoon (in 2002, Merge reissued A Series of Sneaks with two bonus tracks that chronicled the group's disappointment with major-label politics). Daniel moved to New York City, working temp jobs and writing songs, while Eno remained in Austin and designed semiconductor chips. Spoon then signed with the prominent indie label Merge Records, where the band went on to carve out its niche in the increasingly widening modern rock mainstream.
After the release of 2000's Love Ways EP, their sound became increasingly adventurous on 2001's Girls Can Tell. Recorded in Eno's home studio with producer Mike McCarthy, the album's songs were informed by the Kinks, the Supremes, and Elvis Costello. Girls Can Tell built on Spoon's critical acclaim, and sold more than their two previous albums combined. The band capitalized on this success, releasing Kill the Moonlight in August 2002. Hitting number 46 on the Billboard's Independent Albums chart, the album added piano, tambourine and other percussion to Spoon's increasingly stark yet catchy approach, as on the single "The Way We Get By." Daniel began writing songs for the band's next album in 2003. The results were May 2005's cinematic Gimme Fiction, which added multi-instrumentalist Eric Harvey to the fold and debuted at number 44 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart.
After Daniel collaborated with composer Brian Reitzell on the music for the 2006 film Stranger Than Fiction, Spoon's success continued to grow with July 2007's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The first album to feature bassist Rob Hope (Zarbo departed earlier in 2007), it made it to number ten on the Billboard 200 Albums chart, sold over 300,000 copies in the U.S. and topped many publications' year-end lists. Spoon, who by this time had become a fixture on soundtracks, television programs, and late-night talk shows, released their seventh full-length album Transference in January 2010 to a number four debut on the Billboard 200. After touring in support of the album, the band took a few years off. Daniel formed Divine Fits with Handsome Furs' Dan Boeckner, and the band released its debut album, A Thing Called Divine Fits, in 2012. Meanwhile, Eno concentrated on production work, collaborating with artists including the Strange Boys, Alejandro Escovedo, and the Heartless Bastards. Spoon resurfaced in August 2014 with They Want My Soul.
The band's eighth album featured new member multi-instrumentalist Alex Fischel and also marked their first time working with an outside producer in the shape of Dave Fridmann. Hailed by the band as its "loudest and gnarliest" work to date, it was issued by August 2014 through Loma Vista Recordings in the U.S. and Anti in Europe. Like its predecessor, it reached number four on the Billboard 200. The following year, Spoon commemorated the 10th anniversary of Gimme Fiction's release with a deluxe reissue. Late in 2016, the song "I Ain't the One" was featured on the Showtime dramedy Shameless, offering the first taste of Spoon's ninth album. Hot Thoughts, which reunited the band with Fridmann and ranged from dance-rock to stripped-down ballads, was released by Matador in March 2017 and peaked at number 17 on the Billboard 200. Two years later, Spoon issued the best-of collection Everything Hits at Once: The Best of Spoon, a selection of the band's definitive tracks and the new song "No Bullets Spent." Arriving in February 2022, Spoon's gritty tenth full-length Lucifer on the Sofa was co-produced by Mark Rankin and Justin Raisen. Featuring guitarist/keyboardist Gerardo Larios and bassist/keyboardist Ben Trokan, the album's influences included the band's live shows, Daniel's return to Austin, and the music of ZZ Top. ~ James Christopher Monger & Heather Phares, Rovi
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