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In the ’00s, no indie-rock band put out material as consistently strong as Spoon. Britt Daniel steadfastly refused to write even one clunker on Spoon’s records, which were released every two or three years to an audience that was impressed, then amazed, and then slightly bored by how Spoon never made an artistic misstep. This consistency proved to be a double-edged sword. Spoon was both highly respected and yet not passionately adored. Almost everybody that followed indie rock seemed to like Spoon, but never as much as bands not necessarily expected to be brilliant. It was only when you looked back over the course of several years that you realized that, holy shit, Spoon was one of the best bands of its era.
— Steven Hyden’s Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? series on the Onion AV Club is one of the best things going on in music writing right now. Every bit of it is brilliant, spot-on, thoroughly wonderful. This digression about Spoon, which has little to do with its ongoing remembrance of the alt-rock 90s, is so ridiculously CORRECT CORRECT CORRECT that I had to share it here. This phenomenon is the #1 thing I am most bitter about as a music critic. I hate that the thing I most treasure as a fan of music — artists who are consistently brilliant — has this way of damning great musicians to faint praise and/or indifference. Spoon is certainly the best example in recent memory, but it happens with a lot of my favorite acts and ugh ugh ugh. Watch out, James Murphy. You’re next.
