Best way to describe Spoon at ACL Fest: a fully loaded baked potato

Not another blazing set of artisan-crafted songs by hometown heroes Spoon. For the longtime indie rockers, who at this point can rival any Austin band ever for a Sweet-As-Heck Discography Award, an Oct. 9 Austin City Limits Music Festival drop-in was an in-form showcase for the old heads.

This band’s buzzy breakout “Kill the Moonlight” is 20 years old after all. Britt Daniel and Co.’s generation of college radio peaked in popularity during ACL 2005 — let’s pour one out for the band Bloc Party, wherever they are — and all that’s left is years of good will built around geeky love for Western secular pop.

Here are 5 moments that further cemented the band’s place on Austin’s Mount Rushmore of bands.

The fest-ready arena drums of 'Rent I Pay.'

Way to establish the run at Zilker with that winning opening tune, fellas. The Side A, Track 1 from 2014’s “They Want My Soul” perfectly laid out the stakes at the Honda stage: Jim Eno will drum loudly but with precision. The reverb will wash over his percussion like beer on a flip-cup table.

Like the lyric from the second song they played goes, mildly successful radio hit “I Turn My Camera On,” it all hit me like a tom.

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Alex Fischel’s impressive keyboard solo during 'My Mathematical Mind.'

Spoon rose with piano-fueled numbers like “The Way We Get By,” which featured on the series finale of Showtime’s long-running “Shameless.” But Fischel is less interested in piano bar antics and ran this breakdown through a guitar pedal so that it would sound like a stun gun. Spoon does this a lot: Elevating guitar rock with feedback and loops. As Fischel told The 13th Floor in 2017, the band was working with a record producer who wired two versions of a song together by saying, “OK, Britt, go to the guitar effects cabinet, and pick ten pedals that speak to you.”

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Bassist Ben 'Benny B-Sides' Trokan walking the dog during 'Don’t You Evah.'

Every great tune needs a groovy home plate.

Britt Daniel revisiting 2005’s heartbreaking acoustic ballad 'I Summon You.'

First, “You’ve got the weight of the world coming down like a mother’s eye — and all that you could give is a cold goodbye” is such a finely penned lyric. Second, Daniel said onstage that it was written “half a mile from here at 700 Hearn.” (It’s actually 0.8 miles from Zilker.)

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The closing block of sax stabs courtesy of the Fantasma horns.

The band landed the ACL plane backed by local outfit Grupo Fantasma offering up three saxophones and a trombone player. They tricked-out four songs, including mariachi standard “The Underdog” and doo-wop epic “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb.”

Spoon wasn’t always this breezy live. The band loves to explore universally cool influences — Eno’s bass drum featured a black-and-white photo of Little Richard—and arrange with origami edges. As a result, the stage show can be historically slow. This version of the band, however, is a fully loaded baked potato.

At ACL Fest Weekend 2

Spoon performs at 4 p.m. on Sunday at the Honda stage.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Spoon gives a classic set at ACL Fest 2022 Weekend 1 in Austin, TX