When Girls Can Tell was released, suddenly it became known that Spoon was named after the Can song. Looking back to Telephono, it's hard to believe that such a straightforward retelling of Black Francis' fables would have anything to do with kraut rock. Considering the sound of Girls Can Tell, though, it makes for interesting and questionably timely trivia. While this is not the place to get into how succesfully Spoon brings Cannisms into the indie pop world, similar things are happening on 31 Knots new album It Was High Time to Escape, and the Portland, Oregon power trio is able to make a successful marriage of these two disparate styles. However, unlike Spoon, there's no romance to 31 Knots' pop music, as instead the music is more confrontational, reminiscent of post-punk bands like Shellac and Liars. Songs like "Darling, I" are pessimistic tell-offs, flavored with colorful language like "studies show more than half the time we move our mouths we're full of shit" (which does sound rather Albini-esque no matter how much singer Joe Haege's voice sounds like Rivers Cuomo). Of the power trio triptych, bassist Jay Winebrenner provides the most consistent and interesting sounds, and Haege relies on him a lot to carry the more minimal passages as his more inspired and more powerful guitarwork is used conservatively (likely to the music's benefit). Spoon probably has a tougher job bringing math and kraut rhythms into indie pop than 31 Knots does bringing pop hooks into math rock, but that doesn't make their math pop any less interesting or noteworthy, as It Was High Time to Escape is both as powerful and interesting as rhythmic math rock and as hard to put down as good indie pop.
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