BUILT TO SPILL: THERE IS NO ENEMY (2009)
1) Aisle 13; 2) Hindsight; 3)
Nowhere Lullaby; 4) Good Ol' Boredom; 5) Life's A Dream; 6) Oh Yeah; 7) Pat; 8)
Done; 9) Plating Seeds; 10) Things Fall Apart; 11) Tomorrow.
God, how tedious. Somehow, on their seventh LP
Built To Spill preserve the relative simplicity and accessibility of You In Reverse, but lose that album's
momentum. No more fast rockers, no more colorful power-pop, no more tense
pulsating melancholic vibes like there were in ʽTracesʼ. Instead, we get
another set of largely interchangeable, monotonous mid-tempo alt-rock tunes,
everything about which is predictable — if there is yet another leaf unturned in the personal logbook of Doug
Martsch, There Is No Emeny ain't in
no hurry to turn it over.
Maybe that's what Doug Martsch thinks, too,
because what else would lead him to naming one of the songs ʽGood Ol' Boredomʼ?
Yes, indeed, "it's nice but it's not that exciting", as he sings
after the lead guitar line, curiously reminiscent of the fanfare riff in Yes'
ʽAnd You And Iʼ, has been silenced to let in our friendly, slightly effeminate
singer. And as if in support of that, he returns to his old favorite way of
mumbling the vocals, while all the guitars are equally muted, with this
irritating «muffled» mix that isn't exactly lo-fi, yet still creates the
illusion of a thick screen between yourself and the music, which is never a
good thing, really.
But it is hardly the worsened production that
is the record's biggest problem — no, it is the lazy, paralyzed songwriting,
where you get track after track of generic folk-rock chord progressions and
weakly Beatlesque vocal harmonies (ʽLife's A Dreamʼ) that feel deeply
derivative, totally familiar, and mining those mines that are already
completely depleted. In fact, at least half of these tracks, I am sure, exist
only as sonic pads for the next in a series of Doug Martsch's Really Important
Metaphysical Thoughts, such as: "And if God does exist / I am sure he will
forgive / Me for doubting him / For he'd see / How unlikely he / Made himself
seem". I once said something like that at dinner, too, but I never
thought about making it into a song — who knows, maybe I'd have been able to
come up with something better than ʽOh Yeahʼ, a lumbering dinosaur strolling
along a path of power chords.
What's even
worse, this record drags on for almost an hour: eleven songs, stretched out to
what seems like infinity, and all of them so similar to each other that it is
no wonder most reviews of the album I've seen concentrate on the lyrics, trying
to decode Martsch's cryptic messages to the world. Or maybe not so cryptic — I
mean, there's nothing too cryptic about "The more you have to live for /
The more you love your life / The harder it will be for you to die / And we all
want dying easy". Uh, yeah, sure, whatever. I actually preferred him when
he sang pure nonsense — that way, you could just not bother at all, but here,
Pitchforkers all over the world just slobbered over these bits-o'-banalities (Pitchfork:
"For the first time in almost 10 years, it seems that Martsch
might actually have something he wants to say" — if so, maybe he shouldn't be saying
anything), and forgot to think about whether the music here actually means anything.
I have no way of explaining what exactly went
wrong in between You In Reverse and
its utterly uninspired follow-up — the players are essentially the same,
co-producer Dave Trumfio has a decent reputation, and according to various
interviews, Martsch was in high spirits when entering the recording studio. Of
course, once again do remember that essentially all Built To Spill albums sound
the same, and the qualitative difference between any of their two records is
negligible in the grand scheme of things. But every once in a while, they put
out an album that seems to suggest there is yet some hope for the old gray
school of Nineties' alt-rock — like You
In Reverse — and then they put out an album that almost makes me swear off
guitar-based rock music and go wash my ears out with a piano concerto or,
pending that, with some Eurodisco. Anything but
another eight-minute mid-tempo post-grunge psychosermon from Doug Martsch. This
one, I think, deserves a thumbs down all the way.
Horrible. I agree completely. What a disappointment after You in Reverse!
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