Spoon and The Beths shared the bill at KEMBA Live! in Columbus on Sunday night, and each act claimed the same room by opposite means.
Kicking the night off was Squirrel Flower who opened slow and unhurried. Ella Williams built her set as an invitation to settle rather than rise, and its most generous moment came when The Beths’ guitarist, Jonathan Pearce, walked out to join her on “Reelin,” threading a recorder through the song. It was a small piece of stagecraft, and it set the table for what followed.
The Beths took the stage and gave the room everything they had, opening with the title track from their new record, Straight Line Was a Lie. Elizabeth Stokes fronts the New Zealand quartet like someone you’d find at the next table over, self-deprecating between numbers and openly curious about local customs. She got a fast education in the call-and-response, lobbing “O-H” into the dark and grinning at the “I-O” that came back, then floated exporting the trick home to New Zealanders “K-I-W-I.” During “No Joy,” Pearce and bassist Benjamin Sinclair each fired a recorder skyward from a launcher, close to ten feet high, so they could play the part without shedding their guitars. The gag drew a laugh, and the songs under it held their weight — “Future Me Hates Me,” “Expert in a Dying Field,” a catalog of hooks that earns the affection it courts.
The room itself became a factor before Spoon took the stage. The heat outside had caught much of the crowd off guard for an indoor show, and the temperature on the floor climbed with the wait. Several people fell ill between sets, and paramedics worked the crowd in the gap. One person threw up, and a few others passed out. All were escorted to a safe place for observation.
When Spoon appeared, the contract changed. The Austin band has spent close to thirty years paring their catalog down to working parts, and the live show runs on that economy. Britt Daniel said almost nothing between songs, trusting clean transitions and momentum to do the talking, and the band moved harder than anyone who had preceded them. Fittingly, “I Turn My Camera On” landed early, right around the moment the photographers were waved out of the pit — the cameras going dark as the song turned its own on. The set drew across the decades, “The Way We Get By,” “My Mathematical Mind,” “Rent I Pay,” and folded in three covers: Wolf Parade’s “Modern World,” the Rolling Stones’ “Sway,” and the Cramps’ “TV Set.” The encore closed on “The Underdog.”
Two readings of the same exchange played out across the night. The Beths win a room by handing over everything — the jokes, the launchers, the open face turned toward the crowd. Spoon wins it by handing over almost nothing personal and trusting the songs and the bodies onstage to carry the rest. Daniel keeps the patter and the confession to himself, and the withholding is the point. Both approaches worked on the same Columbus floor inside a few hours. The crowd that outlasted the heat got the fullest version of each.
