Built to Spill
Playing Exit/In May 22
In "Car," Built To Spill's transporting 1993 single, frontman Doug Martsch sings, "You get the car, I'll get the night / off, you'll get the chance / to take the world apart / and figure out how it works / Don't let me know what you find out." Later, in a voice that sounds like a cross between Neil Young and a 5-year-old boy trying out his first tape recorder, he delivers the payoff: "I wanna see movies of my dreams."
Hearing these words for the first time, the chords surging with an energy that seems to issue from Martsch's pronouncement, all a listener really can say is "Of course, everyone wants to see movies of their dreams." It's this abiding sense of wonder, coupled with Martsch's affable, everyman persona, that made Boise's Built To Spill one of the best bands to rise from indie obscurity during the last decade or so, paving the way for the likes of Modest Mouse and The Shins.
The undisputed leader of the group, Martsch is the only member of Built To Spill who has played on all of the band's albums. On most of those records, his clever, disjointed songwriting vies for attention with his longwinded guitar soloing, which, while spirited and entertaining, is the lesser of his talents. Until recently, the songwriting has won out more often than not, but on the band's disappointing last album, the plodding Ancient Melodies of the Future, Martsch seems to be doing little but following the chords long enough to allow stretches of noodling to develop, ultimately for the songs to trail off and go nowhere.
After a lull in which Martsch recorded a solo album, the bluesy, sentimental Now You Know, Built To Spill are back on the road, ostensibly to support an album that's now 4 years old. Whatever the impetus for their current tour, when the group play to their strengths, they still are one of the best rock bands out there, and Martsch is a joy to hear sing. Newcomers should start with 1994's There's Nothing Wrong With Love, a sloppily played, grin-inducing record that a lot of people pinned to their hearts in a way that wouldn't happen again until The Shins came along at the turn of the decade. From the opening notes of "In the Morning" to the wheezing, overbent guitar sound that would influence early Modest Mouse, the album was magic.
Where There's Nothing Wrong With Love was messy and homespun, the band's 1997 major-label debut, Perfect From Now On, was vast and moody and offered multiple serpentine instrumental passages to get lost in. If these were movies of dreams, they were big-budget movies; you could sense that the band and their producer Phil Ek had something to prove in making the jump to the big leagues. Still, the songs retained the elemental sense of wonder and the vivid, head-churning lyrics of Built To Spill's earlier material. "You thought of everything," Martsch sings in "Velvet Waltz," "but some things can't be thought." It took some getting used to, this new scale of things, but the space-rock trappings were of a piece with the expansive themes of the songs.
When Built To Spill hit the road to support the album, people would call out the names of older numbers, especially that beloved ditty about the automobile, and Martsch would do none of the expected things. He wouldn't ignore the request or grant it, or even say, "We don't do requests." Instead, he would say, a little sheepishly, "We don't know that one." Then, after too brief a set, he would announce that the band were about to play their final song, which he informed the audience was rather long and had no words, before adding, "So, if you're not into that kind of thing, you should leave now." What followed was something that wasn't really even a song so much as a lazy chord progression and a bunch of runs up and down a scale—for 48 maddening, uninteresting minutes. This was the first real sign of the band's split personality. There had been hints of it on their 1993 debut, Ultimate Alternative Wavers, but nothing like this.
Thankfully, on 1999's polished, energetic Keep It Like a Secret, the writing returned; the album was full of well-crafted pop songs, with hardly a wasted note. There certainly was nothing to indicate the sense of fatigue that would overrun Ancient Melodies of the Future, except perhaps that the band's live sets began to feature more of the pothead excesses that had marred the Perfect From Now On tour.
Four years have passed since Ancient Melodies came out, so there's no telling what sort of show Built To Spill has planned for Exit/In on Thursday. Here's hoping, though, that one of the better songwriters in recent memory will spend less time on note-bending and more on his wonderful originals—songs that evoke movies of our dreams, rather than sounding like the washed-out soundtrack to them.
