Dougy Described Eternity
At the beginning of Perfect from Now On, the third album for Built to Spill, frontman Doug Martsch announces his ambition not with musical excess, but lyrical dexterity. With, let's be honest, glorious alt-rock poetry. The first verse on this, the very-best album by the Boise-based indie mainstays, is, in such, one of the great opening salvos in musical history; a stanza that lays down a sizable thematic/artistic gauntlet.
"Every thousand years/this metal sphere/ten times the size of Jupiter/floats just a few yards past the Earth," Martsch begins. "You climb on your roof/and take a swipe at it/with a single feather/hit it once every thousand years." So far, so strange. But, soon, his metaphor comes into focus: "'til you've worn it down/to the size of a pea/yeah, I'd say that's a long time/but it's only half-a-blink/in the place you're going to be."
Now check the song title: "Randy Described Eternity." Woah! Like the veil of reality pulled away on a philosophizin' stoner, the beginnings of this magical, masterful BTS LP pull the veil away from indie-rock; strip it of its sloppiness and sarcasm, scuttle the misplaced commercial ambitions that were commonplace in the wake of grunge-mania.
Built to Spill's members —at this point, Martsch, bassist Bret Nelson, and drummer Scott Plouf— had all lived in Seattle, and had seen the fall-out. Martsch may've just signed to Warner Bros., but he wasn't going to be anyone's patsy. With major-label dollars in his pocket, Martsch was letting his ambition run unchecked.
The Quest for Perfection
Built to Spill had won their reputation through a series of singalong 7"s for Calvin Johnson's impeccably-credentialed underground powerhouse K Records, then delivered a killer second record with 1994's achingly beautiful There's Nothing Wrong with Love. But, where Martsch's early output had been sweet songs, silly songs, and sweetly silly songs, by his third record the songwriter was lost in a world of daydreams and dream-scapes, daring to imagine the scope of the universe, then contemplate his own place as a tiny speck within it.
Befitting such lyrical grandeur, Perfect from Now On upped the musical ante. The stripped-down, three-piece sound of There's Nothing Wrong with Love gave way to a shifting kaleidoscope of studio sonics; layers of guitar, moog, optigan, and cello swirling over Plouf's hi-hat-hissing playing. Produced by Phil Ek (who'd go on to work with The Shins, Fleet Foxes, and the Dodos), the record manages to balance its many instruments in constantly-impressive ways.
Unlike so many discs of the day, it doesn’t sound muddy; steering away from de rigueur distortion and quiet/loud bombast, letting Martsch’s nimble-finger’d lead-breaks linger long and languid, as nearly every song sprawls out to some glorious explosion of fretboard fireworks and lover's declarations. As its opening gambit proclaims, this is a disc of pure ambition; one that Martsch recorded three separate times to get it as close to 'right' as he could.
Interestingly, it's much played-upon title (apologies for the above; too easy, I know) was given by Martsch as a mocking back-hander; after years of toil, he was 'burnt out' from its making and filled with disdain for it. Handing over his major-label debut, Martsch washed his hands of it; refusing to play songs from the album, live, in tours thereafter.
It could've been a disaster, too; some form of career suicide in which the the guy who'd written "Car" and "Joyride" (amongst many early coulda-been hits) delivered an album full of six-plus-minute anti-singles. Yet, all the absence of standout jams did was make Perfect from Now On seem even more like an album; even more like a single, serious, ambitious work. An album at its core; an indie-rock epic best taken in one sitting.
