Live Review: Deep Sea Arcade, Spoon

Deep Sea Arcade are the kind of band that should support Spoon only if Spoon were actually the MOR dad-rock band that people think they are, and not one of the most consistently innovative American acts ever. They deliver totally serviceable ‘70s rock with occasional modern indie overtones – like one song that’s pretty much exactly Angles-era Strokes with more nasal vocals. There are some very enthusiastic fans in the crowd, so obviously they’re doing something right, and you can imagine that singer’s awkward gyrating moves might work better at a club show. He’s certainly not done any favours by the way the Hi Fi’s stage forces the five-piece to spread out, with no real connection happening on stage.

Thankfully there’s only one support tonight – we’ve waited five years for Spoon to return to Australia, no more fucking around. The curtains open to drummer Jim Eno cracking out the beat for Knock KnockKnock, before the rest of the band joins him and they rip through that and a few more of last year’s They Want My Soul’s mature pop tracks without pausing for breath. Most of the set is drawn from They Want My Soul and 2007’s break-out GaGaGaGaGa, and while it would have been cool to hear more off 2010’s incredible Transference, the raw sound of that record may not have suited tonight’s triumphant, stadium-sized set. For a band with such a huge back catalogue, they manage to cover most of the bases. The romantic Anything You Want – one of the few truly melancholy songs they’ve ever written – somehow sounds just right nestled next to the menacing Don’t Make Me A Target, which transitions into bluesy acoustic I Summon You from Gimme Fiction, which slinks into the super sexy I Turn My Camera On, intensifying the excitably-dorky hip shaking that’s been going on in the crowd all night.

The band is impeccably tight, and while you feel they could easily reproduce the sound of their records perfectly, the coolest moments come when they take these songs in new directions. Like when they turn the staccato and eerie Ghost Of You Lingers into something huge and uplifting, with rapid, insistent keyboards and yowling vocals. Britt Daniel’s voice through the whole set is unmatchable. He transitions from whispery crooning to yelps and shouts to crystal-clear falsetto without missing a beat, and is the perfect low-key rockstar with boy-next-door charisma and endless positive vibes. They finish with the sweetly lonesome Black Like Me, before returning with an encore of Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s Memory Lane, which is made even cooler by how obviously stoked they are to be covering it, and a stripped-back, sped-up version of The Underdog that somehow makes even this almost unbearably ubiquitous track sound fresh. A total class act.