Spoon – The Cockpit, Leeds 17/11/10

Tonight’s support, label mates Wye Oak, are an intriguing proposition. The Baltimore duo – one singer/guitarist and one keyboard-playing drummer – come on like Beach House after a particularly long Neil Young binge; ethereal waves of synths give way to crunching shards of feedback, while vocalist Jenn Wasner’s dreamy coo keeps everything from sounding too grounded. Powered by Adam Stack’s amazingly effective one-armed drumming, their AV Club-commissioned cover of The Kinks’ ‘Strangers’ ends the set on a haunted note; Wasner tells the crowd they’ll going away for a while to finish their forthcoming third album, but if they make it back to Leeds again, they know there’ll be an appreciative audience waiting.

For their debut Leeds headline show (and their first time back here since supporting Guided by Voices in the mid-nineties), Spoon pull out all the stops; Britt Daniel steps onstage alone and launches into an acoustic rendition of ‘Me and the Bean’, signalling a twenty-one song set which draws widely from all corners of their back catalogue. The band’s songs generally fall into two categories – spaced-out and spacious jams and breezy sixties-style pop, and both sides are done full justice tonight. The loping syncopated groove of ‘Stay Don’t Go’ gets segued into the equally danceable ‘Don’t You Evah?’, with all crazy sound manipulations and effects remaining in tact, while ‘Don’t Make Me a Target’ just might be the highlight of the set, with Daniel rasping at his most ragged, and the song’s instrumental break stretching out in all possible directions, before kicking back into its anthemic protest chorus like a stealth attack. Likewise, the Lennonesque shuffle of ‘I Summon You’, which gets the warmest reception of the night, and ‘The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine’ – possibly the best ode to cross-dressing since ‘Arnold Layne’ – descend into full-on singalongs.

One thing the band can’t be faulted for is their incredible precision; sure, there’s the odd mistake – a dropped beat, a broken guitar strap, and a weirdly funny moment where bassist Rob Pope appears to short out all of the band’s decorative fairy lights – but watching the four members interacting in person, you witness just how intricate each interlocking part of each song is. Likewise, while their experimental production tricks can sometimes be suffocating, tracks that fall flat on record become taut and lean in concert – ‘Trouble Comes Running’, for example, is no longer tethered by its mock-sixties stereo separation and turns into the Who-esque stomper it always deserved to be. On the flipside, however, the barebones treatment of ‘The Underdog’ can’t help but disappoint, with a frenzy of maracas and weedy keyboards barely covering the hole where the gleeful horns once were.

The encore sees the audience treated to some much-loved fan favourites from the band’s earlier days: the heartfelt ‘Everything Hits at Once’ and the spiky (and appropriate, given Britt’s debonair attire tonight) ‘The Fitted Shirt’, before closing with a riotous take on the insistent Hammond Organ pulse of Kill the Moonlight opener ‘Small Stakes’ which kicks into several gears that the recorded version barely hints at. Sure, various fan requests go unheeded, and a number of set staples are dropped (no sign of ‘My Mathematical Mind’ or ‘The Mystery Zone’, for example), but who’s complaining? After a performance like tonight’s, the only real concern is why there aren’t more people here. If you’re not convinced by Spoon on record, you owe it to yourself to give them a chance live – anyone at tonight’s show can back me up on that.

Watch the new video for ‘Everybody Gets Me But You’ below.