Spoon - Kill The Moonlight

You don't have to get far into Spoon's fourth album, Kill The Moonlight to figure out that Jim Eno is an awesome drummer. The opening track, Small Stakes, has him playing swirling snare and tom rolls over a driving, stacatto piano line. His playing has a dirty, gritty feel to it, and it is enhanced by the roomy, lo fi way the drums sound. This is a guy who knows exactly how his drums should sound, and plays accordingly.

Piano based pop music requires a different feel than most rock music. Where you can usually get by hammering away rock beats in a guitar band, piano rock requires more texture and space. Eno usually holds off at the start of songs, and when he comes in everything just sort of takes off.

He plays around with different styles, he can rock his toms like in Something To Look Forward To, or Johnathon Fisk, where he comes out of a punk rock-ish tom beat into straight rock, and alternates every four bars between them.

In All The Pretty Girls Go To The City (which seems to have the same melody as A Girl Like You by Edwyn Collins) he fills space with his snare rims, and he keeps the song loose and wavy, letting the jangly piano really come through. Basically, Eno is the perfect drummer for this band, and he has been there from the start. He and main songwriter Britt Daniel have been through a lot together. They were signed to a major and subsequently dropped, getting picked up by an indie label, eventually gaining the respect they deserved, and it comes through in how they play off of each other. Their song arrangments have a mature, seasoned feel to them, and I have a feeling it doesn't take them very long to get their songs in working order. They are an example of perseverance and talent finally paying off, and thankfully you can hear them almost everywhere now.

Maybe that means Soulja Boy will be on my TV less and less.

Audio/Visual Evidence : Johnathon Fisk, Someone Something, Small Stakes