REVIEWS:
Built To Spill are a first-rate band disguised as a second-rate one. In theory, absolutely nothing about this band should work. Doug Martsch, the guitarist and lead singer, easily has one of the most grating voices in rock music, a sub-Neil Young whine that on first listen seems totally incapable of coming close to carrying a solid melody. Their songs hardly ever even approach mid-tempo, trudging along in the same messy, slapshod way that a zillion other boring indie-rock bands have already adopted as their "signature sound" much to the delight of indie kids who love that sorta stuff. While they were still together, their live performances made late-period Bob Dylan seem like the Flaming Lips for all the attention they bothered to pay to the audience.
All of this just makes it all the more amazing that they've managed to rise above all of these seemingly devastating flaws to make some of the most impressively detailed, meticulously-structured and complete music that I for one have ever heard. Normally, I just pay lip service to this type of music, sort of understanding the appeal but never actually literally enjoying it myself, but these dudes are an exception, and I still don't really know why. So keep in mind when you read the following reviews that I don't really understand the music -- in other words, it's basically like all of my other pages.
--Rich Bunnell
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I'm really fond of Built To Spill, but their debut album is just a little too close to that cliched, slapshod indie-rock sound for me to sit comfortably while listening to it. First off, it's an hour long. Who the hell wants to listen to a whole hour of music this plodding?!?! Dum-dee dum-dee dum-dee dum GUITARS dum-dee-dum-dum-dum MORE GUITARS + VOCAL MELODY THAT ISN'T ANYTHING SPECIAL, dum-dee-dum, dum-dum-dee-dum GUITARS AGAIN, et cetera, et cetera. It's an alright formula on a song-by-song basis, and the band already has sort of a handle on its cool, thwacking sound (especially on large portions of the lengthy instrumental closer "Built Too Long," though that one's not particularly exciting as a whole), but it just really grows tiring over the course of a full hour's worth of music.
Secondly and more importantly, most of what I love about Built To Spill isn't really present on this album. At their peak, Martsch showed himself capable of writing carefully-structured songs that manage to reign in the more wankworthy tendencies that the band would normally indulge in, all while not really repeating himself, but on here everything is just way too loose. Some of the songs like the hard-edged, strum-happy "Revolution" and the opener, interestingly enough titled "The First Song," show signs of the band's trademark crunch developing, but others like "Hazy" and "Shameful Dread" manage to stumble through their distressingly long-ass running times without finding solid footing in basic songwriting mainstays like a solid melody or at least a groovin' rhythm section for me to listen to instead of the melody.
The songs are still kind of interesting and idiosyncratic, though, which is a plus. One thing that always bugs me when I'm listening to music is that, since I've listened to maybe 900 or so albums up to this point in my life, I just know that when I'm listening to a melody that sounds really interesting and cool, it'd probably already been done by some prolific singles band in the '60s that I just happen to have not heard yet. But I just know that nobody in their right mind could've written a chorus like the one to "Nowhere Nothin' Fuck-Up" - that sudden shift in cadence ("Noooowhere noooooothin FUCK-UP!") is just too antithetical to what most would consider the correct process for writing a song for anyone to have come up with it before Martsch, and on top of all that, the song's pretty catchy. The same goes for the fuzzy singalong "Three Years Ago Today," a should-have-been single built around a complicated, cute little riff - the song doesn't quite go where you would expect it to go, but it still manages to remain a crunchy, infectious pop song nevertheless, which is a pretty neat trick.
If most of the album were as reigned in as its best material, it'd be a minor masterpiece and probably a hell of a lot easier to find on CD, but there's just too much lazy microwave dickery here for me to enjoy most of it on anything above a "trying to impress my indie-hipster friends" level. There's a cool riff here, a nice beat there, a decent vocal melody there, but I don't like listening to music when it feels like I'm grasping for straws just for the sake of being able to remember an album's positive aspects. That's not how music should work, dammit!!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
One thing that I've noticed about my reviews is that I have a tendency to take some totally superficial, obvious aspect about a band and then center every single review on the page around that one aspect like it was the only thing that mattered about their albums. I'm not gonna go through a laundry list of examples since that would make it even more obvious that I was trying to fill up space (which I am), but the thing that I'm going to try not to do is make it seem like the only thing that determines how good a Built to Spill album is is the tightness of the band. That's what my brain wants to do, but I'm not going to let it. See - you're not actually reading record reviews, you're reading some dork's mental scratch paper. Compared to Ultimate Alternative Wavers, this album is waaaaaay up there on the proverbial goodness scale, but it's not just because the band sounds tighter. ;It's more that the band's music actually seems to have a sense of direction on here, a reason to exist beyond "lie there like a crumpled bag of moldy Fritos and hope that some college student walks by and decides to like you."
You know "Car"? You probably don't know "Car." You should know "Car." You should really, really know "Car." At one point, I didn't know "Car," but someone who did know "Car" sent me an MP3 of "Car" and once I heard "Car" I knew that I had to hear more songs by any band that could write a song as good as "Car." It's delicate and hard-edged all at once, and I somehow managed to go ten or so listens without noticing that the song had a string section, which just made it even better when I finally did notice. It's a fantastic song in a fertile patch of other fantastic songs - "In The Morning" opens the album sounding a lot like something along the lines of "Three Years Ago Today" but proves to have a lot more weird tricks up its sleeve, and "Big Dipper" is a stomping fit of childish whimsy with a false ending that genuinely surprises me every single time I listen to the song. Granted, that's mostly because I lack the ability to make new memories and I'm currently living the rest of my life using photographs to track down Dennis DeYoung for murdering music. "Reasons" isn't nearly as great as those three, but it's included in the same opening patch of songs so it gets dragged along for the ride, the lucky bastard.
"Twin Falls" is definitely a strong contender for a list of the most charming songs I've come upon in my earthly travels, though it would've been cooler if the song were about Twin Peaks. I guess Martsch values his childhood memories more than cherry pie. Those must be damn good childhood memories. Whether or not I like the rest of the stuff on the album pretty much rests entirely on how long the songs are, which means that I don't care whether "Some" or "Stab" may be fan favorites for all I know because they're almost six minutes long and seem dead set on evaporating every droplet of piss out of my body through the sheer force of the incredible boredom they inspire. How about that "Israel's Song," though? That's good stuff - a tense, instantly memorable guitar hook, depressingly whiny, weary-sounding vocals - in short, exactly the type of song that Israel should adopt as its national anthem. Sorta like how the album is exactly like the debut, only with most of the irritating crap tweaked with to enough of a degree that the end result ends up being a lot more filling and enjoyable. It's garage rock for people whose garages are so messy that a band could never feasily play in them.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I wasn't sure whether or not I even wanted to buy this album at first - I was pretty fond of There's Nothing Wrong With Love, but it was definitely more due to concise stuff like "Big Dipper" than the long, sprawling five-minute clunky fuzz-rock stuff like "Some," and when my eyes grazed the album's back cover I couldn't help but notice that five minutes was the minimum length of the songs on here. Boise, we have a problem. There's a reason, though, that the ears and their accompanying sense of hearing have a total monopoly over the judgment of music, which is why I knew that I couldn't let my eyes try to usurp on their territory by telling me "Look at that tracklisting! This album has to suck!" Luckily enough, my ears laid down the law and I ended up buying the album, with my eyes being penalized by being forced to look at pictures of Night and Day-era Joe Jackson for a week. They never tried to act up again.
Built to Spill's sound dramatically shifts for the better on this album - on their first two albums, everything resembled a sloppily thrown-together mess of guitars and lazy drum beats that occasionally synced with one another when they felt like going along with Martsch's vocal melody just for the hell of it, but on here everything is 100% rigid. A label shift to Warner Bros. probably gave them more cash to blow on the recording sessions, which couldn't have hurt, but for whatever reason the entire band sounds like a singular, functioning unit on here. I'm not talking about improved instrumental chops - a good way to describe it is that it sounds like all three bandmembers (including drummer Scott Plouf, somehow) are all huddled together as closely as possible but still playing their instruments while walking around in this configuration, with every movement in the music representing a singular movement on the part of every bandmember. Like the "you don't owe me anything" verses on "Stop The Show" - yowsers, that's some punchy, disciplined stuff.
What really matters, though, isn't the sound - it's more that the songs are mostly really fantastic. Martsch finally hits upon his central skill on this album, which is constructing songs that don't have a tendency to repeat themselves but instead just kind of naturally develop from one melody to another. The thing about this that separates this songwriting style from, say, "Supper's Ready" by Genesis, or to strike a more indie comparison, pretty much every song Modest Mouse have ever written, is that the songs still seem like individual, complete songs and not medleys. "I Would Hurt A Fly" is a good example, with four minutes of actual song and two minutes of a thoroughly compelling, natural sounding band jam that sounds like an organic part of the song and not boring whatsoever. "Kicked It In The Sun" is half dreamy ballad, half uptempo strummy rocker, but it doesn't pull off this shift in a stop/start "Stairway To Heaven" or "Wheel And The Maypole" sort of way - in fact, I barely even notice that the shift even occurs.
Still, even though the album title is a fairly good indication of Built to Spill's musical approach from this point onward, I have to admit that the album's not perfect. All of the songs are generally pretty good, but averaging seven minutes apiece, they're bound to have boring parts, and they do. I really love the closer "Untrustable" for about three minutes, for example, but the rest of the song doesn't have nearly as great of a melody, going off in a direction reminiscent of a guitar-heavy version of CSN's "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," only not as awesome as that description might make it sound. Also, after the novelty of the sound of the tremelo + string-drenched "Velvet Waltz" wears off, pretty as it is, the song's actual melody isn't that memorable. Still, this album is important for rerouting the band's musical approach in a totally new direction, and it, by and large, is a very cool set of songs. If it wouldn't annoy my roommate (which it would), I'd want to wake up to "Randy Described Eternity" every single day. Every. Single. Day.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Even though this probably isn't the most substantial album that Built to Spill ever recorded, and definitely lacks the epic quality of the previous album, it's still probably my personal favorite. It's allegedly a concept album told from the point of view of Richard Nixon's secretary, but I'm pretty sure that was just a smarmy joke on Martsch's part towards the people who read his press releases, since aside from song titles like "The Plan," I don't hear it. What matters is that, as far as I'm concerned, this is the total pinnacle of their sound - on Perfect From Now On, Martsch gave his backing band a kick in the ass and swerved it into crunchy, amazingly appealing musical territory, and this is where he takes the sound to its logical extreme and uses it to crank out smartly-written tunes that actually don't tend to go past the dreaded five-minute threshold. It's essentially what Perfect would've sounded like if the eight-minute songs were divided in half and repackaged into two separate and totally kickass songs, and the resulting album is so unbelievably good that each time I listen to it, I like music in general a little more.
Maybe that's a bit of a blatant exaggeration, but one thing's for sure - these are the most amazingly hummable songs that Martsch has ever written, with or without the band. If "Car" didn't exist, "Center Of The Universe" would without question be my favorite Built To Spill song, interweaving a clumsy riff with a playful vocal melody and chunka-chunka stop-start sound which is almost too good for me to explain in mere mortal words. Some of the songs are complemented with stylistic exploration without sacrificing their catchiness, ranging from "Time Trap," which eventually morphs into a twisted, distinctively Built to Spill approximation of reggae, to "Sidewalk," which isn't much of a "stylistic exploration" per se but is undoubtedly the fastest song the band ever recorded (which isn't all that fast, but let's give them credit where credit is due). "The Plan" and "Temporarily Blind," on the other hand, are catapulted into greatness by sounding sprawling and undisciplined for most of their running times but then randomly shifting gears into bursts of full-band tightness which in themselves make the songs totally worth listening to.
The album's only real problem is concentrated into the eight-minute closer "Broken Chairs," which is as long as a Perfect From Now On track but considerably more unmemorable and dull, and probably could've been left off of the album without much consequence. Everything else is ace - even "You Were Right" keeps itself from being a Pavement-esque slacker joke (with lyrics like "You were right when you said all we are is dust in the wind") by matching its lyrics to an anthemic melody that Pavement could only hope to write during its later years instead of crap like "Fight This Generation."
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
What is with these smarmy pseudo-indie bands? They're, like, so concerned with being idiosyncratic that they seemingly spend half of their recording sessions crafting album titles that are as bizarre and awkward as possible just so indieheads can say "Wow! What clever blokes!" when flipping through the indie section of their local cool-ass indie record store. All Hands On The Bad One? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Everywhere And His Nasty Parlour Tricks? Duuuuh, you're smart, Mr. Modest Mouse guy, you, now get back to actually writing songs so you'll come out with an album with a frequency more than every three years. This album title makes a little more sense since all that it's based on is a simple contradiction and thus some actual meaning can be interpreted from it, but still... it's just... so... calculated. This is important because, as we all know, an album's title is more important than the music contained within. With that in mind, I give the album a 5 and say "Toodles! Too bad you guys had to break up after such a disappointing, limp crap-piece!"
......or I could actually judge the album on its musical merits and admit that it's pretty damn good. It's Built to Spill at their most diverse, which isn't necessarily all that diverse, but it at least means that for once they spread their musical vision across a somewhat wide variety of musical textures and sounds. They haven't exactly branched out into jungle and hip-hop (which would admittedly be really, really interesting), but at least they're doing a different kind of rawk than the sound which so homogenized their four previous albums. Like, get this - "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" is fast!!! I know, isn't that weird? Doug Martsch actually managed to drag his rhythm section away from the inhalants for long enough to get them to play above 30 bpm! And "The Host"? It has strings!..... okay, I admit, these "stylistic innovations" are pretty goddamn pathetic, you have to nurture these creative tendencies, minor as they may be, or they'll never fully develop.
To be honest, it's really nothing but a good, strong album that doesn't really rise to the plateau carved out by their best works, what with it not having quite enough knockout standouts to be another Keep It Like A Secret(B). It doesn't mean that "Strange" isn't one of their all-time greatest songs, though - the clomping rhythm and lazy, slipshod paint-by-numbers electronic elements on paper combine into a dull, sludgy mess, but the actual finished product is faboo. Also, acoustic ballads were never really Built To Spill's forte (not so much due to lack of expertise as opposed to lack of trying at all), but somehow "The Weather" turns out being awesome anyway. Plus, the song inspired the only bit of humanity displayed by the band the one time I saw them live - for the duration of the show, none of them would even acknowledge that the audience existed, until Doug sat down and played that song solo and someone shouted out "That was beautiful!" upon its end. The response he received was a mumbled "...Thank you." Then the band went on to ruin the mood by turning "Nowhere Nothin' Fuck-Up" into a half an hour sludge-jam, but you can't win 'em all.
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