BUILT TO SPILL: PERFECT FROM NOW ON (1997)
1) Randy Described Eternity;
2) I Would Hurt A Fly; 3) Stop The Show; 4) Made-Up Dreams; 5) Velvet Waltz; 6)
Out Of Site; 7) Kicked It In The Sun; 8) Untrustable/Part 2 (About Someone
Else).
By the time Built To Spill's third and allegedly
best album comes along, I think I understand what my major problem with Doug
Martsch is. Simply put, the man is just not as much of a «guitar sound
magician» as he tries to make us believe. Yes, there is quite a bit of
experimentation with song structures, overdubs, guitar tones, and chord
progressions going on, but all of it is still strictly written in «rock
language», and when you look at all the separate parts one by one, they are
rarely all that special. The melodies are far too complex to trigger immediate
gut reaction à la Nirvana (I think
Doug Martsch would have died of shame if he ever got caught with an ʽIn
Bloomʼ-type riff on one of his songs), yet not
«where-the-hell-did-this-come-from?»-sort of complex enough to amaze and astound
you.
That said, Martsch at least tries to live up to
the album's rashly presumptuous title — especially considering that somehow
along the line he managed to secure his band a contract with nothing less than
Warner Bros., while at the same time retaining the right to creative freedom.
So here was an actual challenge to produce something that could be commercially
viable and artistically meaningful at the same time, and, fortunately, the
man's ambitions burst through the bland indie-rock shell that so thickly
enveloped There's Nothing Wrong With
Love and carried him towards anthemic, psychedelic, and noise-rich
heights. This is very clearly an album that wants,
oh so desperately, to be the Grandest Serious Record of the decade, and Martsch
invests so much of himself in the effort that I fully understand people who
like to swear by this record, particularly if they were in their world-sniffing
teens at the time, and Doug Martsch was their Pete Townshend, taken to the next
advanced level of conscience.
The songs here are lengthy — indeed, way too lengthy for a potentially
commercial album released on a major label — and almost always drift from one
melody into a completely different one, even if the key will probably remain
the same. It's not as if they really needed to do that, because the permeating
mood is consistently philosophical and almost meditative, rather than adventurous:
Martsch states that in the very first song, dealing with the concept of
eternity and its relation with the fleeting individual, and then never really
lets go until the last minute. These are not cosmic voyages into some flowery
parallel universe — they are trips inside the depth of your mind, sometimes
guided by rationality, sometimes just going off the deep end without bothering
too much where the stream will end up taking you. They often promise genuine
depth and occasionally hint at real beauty, although, alas, the hint usually
remains just a hint for me.
One problem is that, although the album is
still essentially a «pop» album, Martsch's singing abilities remain
unsatisfactory. Not only does he have this really limited, annoying vocal
range, but his vocals are usually mixed «below» the instruments rather than
«above» them, which means that your attention is supposed to be focused on the
guitars (or even on the accompanying cello, deftly played by guest musician John
McMahon on about half of the tracks) rather than on the singing — but that is
just plain silly, considering that the biggest hooks are sometimes planted
right in the vocal, not instrumental, bits (like the chorus to ʽI Would Hurt A
Flyʼ, or the "and it never will, no it never will" bit on ʽMade-Up
Dreamsʼ). Honestly, the man should have taken Pete Townshend's example and arm
himself with a more suitable vocalist. I am fairly sure that both John Lennon
and Tom Verlaine must be among Doug's chief influences when it comes to both
songwriting and singing, but he simply isn't big enough to fill the britches of
either one, period. I mean, if he were and if he knew it, why hide your voice
behind a wall of sound?
Another problem is that — so sue me — much too
often, I still have not the faintest
idea what the songs are supposed to be about, or even what my own gut feeling
should suggest to me about them. Naturally, I am not talking about
straightforward lyrical interpretations — but, you know, something like ʽOut Of
Siteʼ is just overflowing with grandeur, starting out like Pink Floyd and
ending a bit like ʽStairway To Heavenʼ, yet I have no idea to what exactly this
grandeur is being applied. There's a lot of raging interlocking guitars that
switch almost at random from playful funky pop to psychedelic rock, but I do
not have any emotional rapprochement
with the material. It's all very clever, but it rings hollow. Or, sometimes, maybe
too derivative — that funky, swampy groove that constitutes the bulk of ʽI
Would Hurt A Flyʼ offers a respectable variation on the formula, what with the
grinning wah-wah guitar licks and the cello complementing each other in a novel
manner, yet the overall effect is still not enough to stop me from smirking,
«oh, gee, Funkadelic meets Electric Light Orchestra», almost against my will.
One thing I will admit: this is not «bullshit rock»,
by any means — not just another «deep» album whose creator just wants to come
across as a serious artist, without any emotional or intellectual capacities to
back up the ambitions. Rather, Perfect
From Now On is that «semi-successful» attempt to justify these ambitions
which has something like a 50/50 chance to irritate or amaze, depending on
one's DNA peculiarities or the particular context in which this album has been
heard. I have listed the primary flaws which render it impotent for me — the
vocals, the emotional confusion, the emphasis on length and complexity of the
structures rather than the individual good parts — but all of this, to a large
degree, just reflects personal taste. Objectively, this is still a huge step
forward from the genericity of There's
Nothing Wrong With Love and, in terms of scale and ambition, from the
technical experimentalism of the band's debut album, so there is no way we
could leave this without a thumbs up, be it ever more «brainy» than
«heartfelt».
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