Then go ahead and check them out live. Hopefully, like me, you’ll be blown away by how much better, more full sounding, and authentic they are live. I love live music, maybe too much, but have never noticed such a difference between recorded and live material from an artist before.

Spoon has played numerous gigs before in New York, but never one that was sold out. A sold out Spoon show? This surprised me more than anything about the show. Apparently I wasn’t the only one surprised, though, as Britt Daniel seemed pretty surprised too, walking on stage for an encore and staring at the massive crowd that made up a sold out gig at Roseland (which is a pretty large venue, by the way). Although the large crowd didn’t arrive until Spoon came on stage, a good portion arrived to see The Ponys (which surprised me, considering not many people usually show up for the opening acts). Despite Coin Under Tongue being unimpressive (who opens a Spoon concert with Metal/Heavy Rock?), The Ponys weren’t too bad, and were one of the first supporting acts I’ve seen that I didn’t truly mind too much. While the audience was laughing at Coin Under Tongue, Britt Daniel was standing offstage staring at them, with a facial expression that resembled “WTF”.

As soon as Spoon hopped on stage, they began with “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case”, an interesting choice to an opener. The great thing about Spoon, and their live gigs, is that they never, ever have the same setlist. Britt and the gang write up a new one every time, and it always seems to work. Quickly, they moved on to play a good load of tracks from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Impressively, they managed to play most of the album, missing Eddie’s Ragga, and Finer Feelings (one of my personal favorites).

The most impressive tracks of the night were “You Got Yr Cherry Bomb”, “The Underdog”, and “The Ghost of You Lingers”. To be honest, I hate the latter track. Yet, live, Spoon seemed to transform it into this Radiohead/Kid A/OK Computer-like song, with Eric Harvey pushing out kickass sounds on his keyboard that shook the entire room.

“You Got Yr Cherry Bomb” was, to say the least, utterly impressive. Spoon brought along three horn players, who, thankfully, turned a song that would be pretty dull live, into one that was incredibly vibrant. With the prominent addition of Daniels’ guitar, and with Harvey’s Vibraphone/Xylophone-like sounds being pumped out of his keyboard, “Cherry Bomb” was definitely one of the best songs they played that night. “Underdog” was also impressive, as without the horns, I don’t think it would’ve been too playable. That night’s version of “I Turn My Camera On” definitely had a faster tempo than the album version, again, making it more suitable for a live gig.

Spoon ended the already kickass concert with My Mathematical Mind, which at first, doesn’t seem like a logical choice for a closer. However, after thinking about it a bit more, and listening to the last minute of that song again, it totally did make sense. Although the crowd wanted Britt to end the evening with “The Way We Get By”, Daniels ended the concert how he wanted to (”The Way We Get By” is a completely overrated and overplayed song).

I can honestly say that Spoon at Roseland was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to, ever. With the Radiohead-esque sounds and the somewhat extended versions of every song (Britt pulled off a few bigger jam sessions here and there), Spoon’s live gig was, again, overly impressive. Spoon definitely put in a lot of effort into making their live perfomances sound even better than ones on the album, and I’ll definitely be seeing them again next time they come around.