Spoon Coming to Missoula [CONCERT]

Indie rock band Spoon were just announced for this year's Sasquatch! Festival, but you don't have to drive all the way to the Gorge to see them.

• Spoon with special guests
• Tuesday, May 21st at The Wilma
• $23 in advance, $25 day of show
• On sale Friday, February 13th at 10 a.m.
• Rockin' Rudys, by calling 866-468-7624 and online
• General admission, all ages, beer & wine with ID

From the press release:

How many times in musical history has the most acclaimed act of an era peaked in its 20th year? We’re not talking a reunion, return to form, twilight years surprise or any of that. We’re asking how many times has a critically and publicly adored band—one still in its prime--released (arguably) its best album at the start of its third decade?

To save you valuable Googling time: It’s happened once, it is in fact happening now, and unlike Haley’s Comet streaking by or whatever, you are fortunate enough to be able to hold it in your hand or on your hard drive. It’s called Spoon: They Want My Soul (out August 5 on Loma Vista).

Yes, the new album from the single most favorably reviewed musical force of the previous decade (Metacritic numbers don’t lie: http://www.metacritic.com/feature/best-music-of-the-decade) already being hailed as “perfect” (Rolling Stone) and "fantastically infectious… perhaps the most confident point of its career” (NPR) also falls roughly on the 20th anniversary of Spoon’s barely-released 1994 debut EP, Nefarious.

So on to the obvious questions: How and why does this happen? After a 20-year streak of unerring excellence in the form of albums like Telephono, A Series Of Sneaks, Girls Can Tell, Kill The Moonlight, Gimme Fiction, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Transference (not to mention EPs like the indispensable Soft Effects, Love Ways, Don’t You Evah and Got Nuffin), how does They Want My Soul raise the bar with surprise premiere first single “Rent I Pay” (http://www.npr.org/event/music/318886316/spoon-premieres-new-song-live), current chart climbing summer anthem “Do You” and the sublimely trippy “Inside Out” (all three of which comprise the 45RPM 10" currently flying out of indie record retailers as part of the http://www.spoontheband.com/vinylgratification/ program)?

Anyway, whatever happened up there was evidently worth it, as the band that turned heads by leaping from Matador to Elektra nearly 20 years ago (only to begin its true ascent on Merge roughly a year later) now triumphantly resurfaces on Loma Vista for album number eight. But hey that’s Spoon, “one of the most consistently great bands in indie rock” (Rolling Stone) yet one not necessarily on an indie label or making records that sound particularly “indie," the kings of the underground whose music has wormed its way into your brain on Veronica Mars and Saturday Night Live, the band that has conceived and executed the Vinyl Gratification campaign in the age of the digital pre-order incentive… If there’s a tried and true formula for anything in this business, look for Spoon to be coming in an opposite lane or direction—but when a band is making records as undeniably classic as They Want My Soul, does any of that matter?