Built To Spill

Doug Martsch, an Idaho native, grew up with a mild but firm, wholly determined passion for music. He attended jazz and harmony schools, dabbled with local bands - the first on record being State Of Confusion, a mid-80s hardcore outfit - and nurtured a love for the poetry of the amateur song, strummed out, crackling, maybe even wrapped in pedals and distortion, yet swollen with emotion. Towards the end of the 80s he formed a band, Threepeople, in which he really was three-in-one: singer, with a truly distinctive voice, yearning and infected with neurosis, a prodigious guitarist, and a handful of compositions (especially those on the sprawling "Guilt, Regret, Embarassment", his 1991 debut) that experimented with guitar effects and layers of distortion. At the same time, his urge grew to push it all towards a unified vision, one that would combine, in the manner of Dinosaur Jr and grunge in general, melodic emotion and cacophonous rage, a message that would land, part seductive and part powerful, right in the heart of the generation he himself was living through.

That's how Built To Spill came to be, with Martsch flanked by Brett Nelson on bass (guitarist in the glorious Caustic Resin, and already alongside Doug in Farm Days), and by a ramshackle but forceful rhythm section, capable of keeping up with the new leader's multifaceted compositions. First came "Ultimate Alternative Wavers" in 1993, then a hastily assembled "There's Nothing Wrong With Love" in 1994: small classics from a schizoid band, torn between electric ballads and loose suite-like stretches, always whipped by accents, tremors and yelps that sketch out a thoroughly frenetic, hallucinogenic vision.

Martsch, however, is above all impatient to refine those ideas further. Over the following two years he conceives a series of compositions no longer built on this alternation between frenetic and calm registers, but now equipped with a paradigm that synthesizes them compactly, while at the same time expanding them without fear of sounding difficult, even extending the sound to alien components. From thought to action, Martsch plays and overdubs guitar upon guitar, keyboards and synthesizers and even - the icing on the cake of this crazed creative effort - a cello, recording himself over and over. The result still sounds lo-fi, just as much as the earlier records; something doesn't quite sit right - these compositions are so important that even the execution has to become solemn.

So alongside the core trio of Martsch-Nelson-Plouf (their third drummer in three albums) come a mellotron (Robert Roth), a cello (John MacMahon) and a second drum kit (Peter Lansdowne), plus synthesizer, percussion and piano, all duties shared out among the original members. This line-up, mutated through successive additions, then kicks off the sessions for "Perfect From Now On" split across no fewer than three studios. Everyone involved immediately senses the stature of the work, something revolutionary that swallows up everything done before, even by the individual musicians themselves.

Martsch's discourse on "Perfect" starts over again with every single track, and each time it comes across as genuinely true, eager to seep into the listener's most skin-deep sensations from the very first bars. Last but not least are the leader's own lyrics, in which the recurring "leitmotif" is a "sound" emitted by some unspecified source, the "generation sound" turned into a totem to be worshipped.

The muted opening, with the subtly irregular tempo of "Randy Describes Eternity", preludes an explosion of pulsing keyboards and symphonic guitar figures, staging Martsch's sermon-like annunciation, a yearning adult-child forging his way through an imperious architecture. It's a sublime alternation of quiet and loud, with the synth's distant weeping, expressionist above all in the finale's crescendo of acid-rock sparks. Likewise "Stop the Show", whose long opening riff is a slow, hallucinogenic swing carried by a sly cello; then everything turns into pure alchemy of controlled, aching rage that builds until it detonates in grandiose fashion, an evolution that runs through hard-rock, 60s pop-song melody, psychedelic raga, and even closes with a kind of sonic collage.

Martsch's never-hidden love for acoustic lo-fi folk reigns at the start of "Made-Up Dreams", before being literally launched into orbit by the synth amid blazing riffs, and then transcended by a moving mellotron-and-cello lament.

The album's free-form, asymmetrical structures are, at the same time, extremely logical, almost inevitable. The choral wall of guitars that opens "I Would Hurt a Fly", with its psych-folk aromas, acid vapors and lyrical cello underlining, releases the tension into an almost religious romance, building to a magnificent closing jam that devours years and years of grunge and noise-rock.

The opening of "Out of Side" instantly lodges itself in memory: the full band, with cello and electronics prominently on display, sets off an unhinged, transcendental Syd Barrett-like chant, and a sprint that turns it into a latex-like groove that thickens and thins out. It's the emblematic track of this balanced perfection of moods and registers, one that absorbs everything and transforms everything.

Every passage is spectacular, hieratic and majestic at once: “Velvet Waltz”, true to its title, is a subdued waltz for three guitars, a ternary rhythm that, unlike the other pieces, never changes here. The leader's Neil Young-esque vocals immediately turn it into an enthusiastic, moving psychedelic carousel and then, subliminally, a fatalistic serenade, before finally becoming a vast, ineffable apotheosis that, once again, swallows up the entire alt-rock lineage, from Motorpsycho to post-rock.

Broadening the view, the album fully resolves the unease of the '90s into a kind of optimistic, pyrotechnic sermon, no less harsh and metaphysical for it. “Untrustable pt. 2” is immediately a powerful invocation, with no introduction whatsoever, and immediately a liberating “refrain”, amid tempo changes in the perfect interplay of the guitars; the dramatic relay gradually dissolves into the concluding ode, surrounded by uncontainable ecstatic languor, with a refined, thoroughly Beethovenian art of variation.

“Kicked in the Sun” doesn't have the same muscle as the other extended pieces, so Martsch's guitar takes the opportunity to turn impressionist, opening out into valleys, into the shimmer of the ocean at sunset, into vital open-air sprints. Here the evolution lies spontaneously in the intensity of the performance, moving from adagio into an instinctive acceleration, a yearning that stands as one of the record's dramatic peaks.

A summa of the entire world of '90s alternative rock, the vibrant closing homily in which the years of deafening youthful turmoil are transfigured into a new expression, finally free and liberating, finally without compromise, without self-imposed rules, dogmas, or poses. The undisputed peak of a poet-guitarist, a Martsch who here also reaches gotha status, a sublime orchestrator who treats the pacing and spacing of the songs' unfolding as precise measures and carefully weighed phrasing, where excess becomes thrilling virtue and exaggeration becomes an unrepeatable delicacy. If it sounds like an expansive, almost titanic reflection, that's also thanks to its innocent and ever-fertile soul. In 2008 Martsch took it on the road, meticulously reassembling its creative line-up show after show (notably the concert at Interzona in Verona that October), belatedly confirming its greatness, perhaps somewhat overshadowed by the still-astonishing follow-up, “Keep It Like a Secret” (1999), the album that sealed their consecration

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

18/03/2013