What Another Band Spills
Indie-rock has now been around long enough that it’s become its own kind of classic rock. With the kids called Generation X growing grayer by the day, it’s no surprise nostalgia reigns; the big-money reformation tours of Dinosaur Jr, The Pixies, and Pavement all memory-lane victory-laps masquerading as punk pilgrimages.
In such a neo-classic canon, Built to Spill are the cult band: the survivors with a history long and rich; the B-listers whose music has influenced countless A-list fans (Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie owing them an obvious artistic debt). Doug Martsch and his crew of careening wigout warriors have been treading the indie-rock boards for nearly 20 years of cheers and beards, even releasing one undoubted classic-indie-rock masterwork: 1997’s Perfect From Now On.
It's been a brilliant, if not-quite-classic-indie-rock career. They’ve never experienced the hysteria of nostalgia simply because they’ve been an indie fixture; never had a chance to reform because they’re never broken up.
Unfortunately, Built to Spill’s last two albums, 2001’s Ancient Melodies of the Future and 2006’s You in Reverse suggested that a break-up may've been good for reasons other than an opportunity for reformation; the LPs feeling a little like a band keeping on for the sake thereof.
They sounded like Built To Spill albums —Martsch’s nasally sneer, sheets of guitar, spiraling guitar solos— but the resemblance seemed skin-deep; they, for whatever reason, lacking that certain magic bottled on both Perfect from Now On and 2000’s Keep it Like a Secret.
Martsch of the Fretboards
Thankfully, the seventh BTS LP, There is No Enemy, rather resembles a return to form. Or, at least, the work of a band at least back in off the bench. It sounds, again, of course, like a Built to Spill album (this a band that embodies the late John Peel’s famous assessment of post-punk survivors The Fall: always different, always the same), but it's one of the better ones. Or, certainly, one better than the last couple of ones.
There's an all-around better feeling for this disc: a better batch of songs; a better quality to the recordings; a better spirit in the playing. "Done" is seven minutes of gloriously ragged punk-country-pysch; in which the three BTS six-stringers play plaintive patterns that chime and gleam in the most glorious ways. "Pat" is two minutes of bloody-minded screaming that rests squarely in the 'anger' stage of grieving. "Hindsight" cruises along on a wispy slide-guitar lick like Pavement circa Brighten the Corners.
There's no way of explaining why these songs work, and work together; no way of quantifying this perception of better. But, let's just say it's not what they do —the rueful lyrics about dreams, the rushing shifts from doleful guitar plonk to walls of noise, the spiraling guitar solos all trademark BTS tics— but the way that they do it. This time, Martsch and co sound like there’s nothing they’d rather be doing than making this record.
Record Label: Warner Bros.
Release Date: October 6, 2009
