Indie Rock Goes Stadium, But Smart: Stefan Beck Reviews Built to Spill

By Stefan M. Beck | Monday, October 15, 2001

I have a little confession to make. Although, I'm a self-described lover and connoisseur of indie-rock, I hadn't, until very recently, heard much Built To Spill. I'd listened to snippets of a few of their songs, in friends' cars, but I hadn't really enjoyed or appreciated what I'd heard. Doug Martsch's voice, with its distinctive Neil Young-twang, had been a painful reminder of the days when I was lame, and knew all the words to CSNY's 'Déj? Vu.' I hadn't wanted to hear anything that even sounded like hippies had a hand in it.

It turns out that my suspicions were enitrely unfounded. Built To Spill, it just so happens, has some pretty remarkable material. An excellent cross-section of the band's stuff is presented on Live (Warner Brothers), a nine-song album recorded during 1999 shows in Denver, Seattle, and New York City.

It must be said that this album has been out for nearly a year; the band has a newer release, 2001's Ancient Melodies of the Future. However, Live is a more significant achievement. It captures an incredible degree of sonic intensity and ingenuity. The band performs songs from four of its seven studio albums. There's also a 'Love As Laughter' cover, a (surprise, surprise) Neil Young cover, and a song by the Halo Benders, a side project involving Martsch and Calvin Johnson.

In other words, Live is a greatest hits album, without the hits. So, assuming there are more than a few Built To Spill virgins out there, this is the perfect starter kit.

The album opens with 'The Plan,' which also opens the band's acclaimed 1999 release Keep It Like a Secret. Martsch and guest-guitarist Brett Netson (of Caustic Resin) unveil the guitar style that defines this album. It has a sort of heavily-tweaked classic-rock flavor, which thoughtfully balances crowd-pleasing hooks with startling squeals and squawks.

So, as Martsch sings, 'The plan keeps coming up again,' we get a hint of what's to come — songs that seem just on the verge of total (and often welome) collapse, but jump back into structure at the last second. Scott Plouf's drumming is disciplined, and decidedly low-key. He works in tandem with the guitars, providing the music with solidity and consistency. And when he needs to rock out a little bit, he goes ahead and does it.

'Randy Describes Eternity,' from 1997's Perfect From Now On, starts out slowly. There is some delicate guitar noodling, and then, thankfully, Martsch brings in the wah-wah pedals and distortion. From this point, the song becomes a push-pull between grace and ferocity. It is among the most abstract in an album dominated by fairly poppy numbers.

It also boasts some of the album's strangest and most engaging lyrics: 'every thousand years / this metal sphere / ten times the size of Jupiter / floats just a few yards past the earth / you climb on your roof / and take a swipe at it / with a single feather / hit it once every thousand years / til you've worn it down / to the size of a pea.' Coupled with the song's loud-soft dynamics, this imagery takes on a perfectly unearthly quality.

One of the album's most unusual and potent songs is 'Virginia Reel Around the Fountain,' a Halo Benders cover from the band's 1998 release, The Rebels Not In. In the song's original version, Martsch and Calvin Johnson (of Beat Happening and Dub Narcotic Sound System) share the vocal spotlight. Built To Spill's version, free of Calvin's vocal meddling, is better and more accessible.

The song is an emotional assault, and its crunching, densely-layered guitars lend a real credibility to that emotion. Martsch's choppy chant, 'Don't say no / just say you don't know,' is, in a strange way, as appealing and affecting as any U2-style stadium rocker.

Clocking in at seven minutes, the song has a truly epic quality. It sweeps along, rising and crashing; in concert, its impressive guitar solo probably elicited giddiness, goose-bumps, and Zippo-salutes from the audience.

Unfortunately, it's followed by the album's only real low point: a self-indulgent, twenty-minute rendition of Neil Young's 'Cortez the Killer'. Why does Martsch want to call attention to the fact that he's Neil Young's vocal doppelganger? Here, he sounds more like Young than usual. In fact, he may sound even more like Young than Young himself does.

Thus, 'Cortez the Killer' sinks to the level of grotesque parody. Its only redeeming quality is that it shows off the band's chops. But lyrics like 'on the shore lay Montezuma / with his cocoa leaves and pearls' sound pretty clunky in the mouth of an indie-rocker from Boise, Idaho. If I liked Neil Young, I'd say it was blasphemous. Since I don't, I'll just say it's lame, and leave it at that.

When this interminable tour-de-bore finally ends, the band turns to one of its oldest songs, 'Car,' which first appeared on 1993's The Normal Years. Both lyrically and musically, it's a bit weak. Much of the song adopts a very generic rock sound, and the few flourishes that the band devises are lost in the tumult. The vocals are whiny and nasal, and the line 'I want to see movies of my dreams' feels like bad poetry — because it is bad poetry.

Nevertheless, it paints a pretty good picture of the band's roots. From the get-go, Built To Spill innovated within the rock medium. The three songs that follow 'Car' on Live demonstrate the incredible end result of that innovation.

First, there is the cover of Love As Laughter's 'Singing Sores Make Perfect Swords.' The song's repetitive lyrics and perpetual background noise provide a framework for a modest but effective guitar solo. Martsch also sings a high-pitched melody over the song's turbulent chord progression.

'I Would Hurt A Fly,' another track from Perfect From Now On, is among Live's best, with its layering of rough chords and a quietly plucked counter-melody. The use of wah-wah and feedback gives its sound a uniquely warped quality, and there are elements of blues in Martsch's guitar solo.

When Martsch sings, 'I can't get that sound you make / out of my head / I can't even figure out what's making it,' and 'do you rub your wings together?', it's downright creepy. But the song's best moment is its explosive conclusion: a stripped-down guitar line played over deafening noise like a tornado ripping a house in half.

Live clearly builds toward something amazing, and that something is 'Broken Chairs,' the last song on the album. The song, from Keep It Like a Secret, is a sprawling and intricate masterpiece. It's about as long as 'Cortez the Killer,' but in this case it earns the right to be so long. Combining feedback, distortion, straightforward hard-rock shredding, and even whistling, 'Broken Chairs' is a singular rock experience.

There are some stretches of really unusual sonic territory in here: after about eight minutes, a crisp snare drum crackles into the song, beneath the sound of a pick being scraped along a guitar string. This leads into a few minutes of wailing and warbling — either feedback, or just bizarre string manipulation.

As the song approaches crescendo, Doug Martsch and Brett Netson unleash guitar mayhem so intense that it makes even Van Halen seem like weak sauce. A tricky math-rock melody emerges; eventually it degrades into a steady, windshield wiper-like drone. Brett Nelson (not to be confused with Brett Netson) provides a virtuoso bassline.

The song ends in glorious chaos, amid sounds of guitar strings snapping, screeching feedback, and amps ready to blow out. It's the perfect ending to an album that both traces the band's stylistic trajectory and demonstrates its skill for improvisation and blistering live performance. As a record of Built To Spill's career, the album is valuable. As an example of what can be achieved within the rock genre, it's an absolute necessity.

Indie Rock Goes Stadium, But Smart: Stefan Beck Reviews Built to Spill

Article Tools

Related Articles