Built To Spill

The guitarist and singer Doug Martsch gained experience in a small local hardcore band in Boise, Idaho, by the name State of Confusion. His true personality began to emerge in 1988, when the group moved to Seattle and changed their name to Treepeople.

The EP Time Whore (Silence, 1990) is a collection of unpretentious pop-punk (Radio Man, Tongues on Thrones), although the instrumental Size of a Quarter suggests the ability of the guitarist. The monumental album Guilt, Regret, Embarrassment (Toxic Shock, 1991), made up of a strong twenty one songs, expands the repertoires of the Butthole Surfers ( Lost) and Dinosaur Jr. ( No Doubt). Doug Martsch is the author of most of the music. This record too has an instrumental piece, Trailer Park, which gives space for experimental ambitions.

The mini album Something Vicious for Tomorrow (C/Z, 1992), and in particular the title track and Funnelhead, begin the turn towards a more commercial sound. Just Kidding (C/Z, 1993) includes some visceral rock, like Anything’s Impossible and House of Pain, but it also continues the downward flight towards the ballads of Soul Asylum ( Today, Outside In). In C is the experimental music of that moment.

Martsch and the other singer and guitarist Scott Schmaljohn kept Treepeople alive for Actual Re-Enactment (C/Z, 1994). Schmaljohn, a singer who bleeds life onto his melodies, unloads the great weight of desperate symbolism onto a vehement hardrock background, mimicking Kurt Cobain on tracks like Feed Me and Better Days. The mood flips from catchy (Liver vs. Heart) to epic ( Slept through Mine). The band is well supported by John Polle on guitar, with a style neurotic and slightly ecstatic in the style of Tom Verlaine.  The songs run the gamut from the excesses of garage rock (What’d I Mean to Think You Said, Bag of Wood) to exciting pop-punk nursery rhymes (Boot Straps).

In 1993, Doug Martsch left the group, moved back to Boise, and formed Built to Spill with Brett Netson (former guitarist of Caustic Resin) and Ralf Youtz for the rhythm section. Here began all of their major careers; they created one of the most shiny and important groups of the 1990s. Not only would Martsch’s future compositions become small rock chamber concerts, but his guitar style imposed him as one of the great masters of the instrument.

The jump in quality from tree people to Built to Spill is impressive. Ultimate Alternative Wavers (C/Z, 1993) flounders in final neurotic winks, influenced by Neil Young ( The First Song and Get a Life) and the suites/jams of the Flaming Lips ( Shameful Dead and Built too Long, which are unhinged and unpredictable). The ballad Nowhere Nothin’ Fuckup, a hymn for the loser that becomes an elegy for the entire nation, coined a very personal style of post-psychedelic, in which the sounds of the guitars are under control and explore a wide range of timbre. The title track (for the band, not the album) has a foundation that instead of rhythm and blues resembles a feedback system shaken by earthquakes. Lie for a Lie is a vaudeville nursery rhyme set to a jaunty rhythm and ravaged by atonal effects. Hazy, a typical “lysergic” chant, utilizes more conventional vocal harmonies. The songs on this album are played with enthusiasm, energy, and expertise, and the album includes a range of fresh ideas that assist the band in creating a link between bands like Dinosaur Jr. and groups still able to experience the psychedelic song.

There's Nothing Wrong With Love (Up, 1994) was, de facto, an autobiographic concept album, centered around the transition from boyhood to adulthood. Built To Spill regressed to a more traditional song format (short, melodic, mostly vocal), but, nonetheless, penned several gems, particularly the ones that have neoclassical touches. In The Morning boasts a circular guitar work that sounded almost like a Bach-ian sonata, besides ending abruptly at the top of a screaming passage. And Stab alternates a pseudo-stoner bacchanal and delicate harp-like guitar strumming with cello counterpoint. But the Beatles-ian strings of Car are neither original nor well integrated with the rock context. The sprightly Kinks-ian The Source and Distopian Dream Girl as well as the slow-burning blues Some are rather uninspired by their standards.

The singles So and So (Saturnine, 1994) and Joyride (K, 1994) crown the band’s training period.

In 1994, Doug Martsch formed the Halo Benders with Calvin Johnson ( Beat Happening) and Steve Fisk ( Screaming Trees).

Built to Spill Caustic Resin (Up, 1996) adds at least When Not Being Stupid is Not Enough to the greter repertoire of Martsch.

After so many distractions, the band finally released their third album. Perfect From Now On (Warner, 1997) is a collection of suites (six minutes average) rather than songs. Doug Martsch, assisted by drummer Scott Plouf (ex- Spinanes), bassist Brett Nelson (a childhood friend of Martsch, occasionally helping on guitar), cellist John McMahon, and mellotronist Robert Roth, finally reaches his peak of musical maturity with this record. The instrumental scores are compact and linear, but at the same time are free and have room to amuse the listener. They are enlivened by constant changes of time and arrangements of cello and mellotron, while long periods of hypnotic jamming, conducted by one of the most atmospheric/environmental guitar styles in rock, lead them into slow metamorphoses of melodic, trance-inducing chants. The songs of Martsch are melancholic in tone, only rarely rearing into vehement choruses. For the most part, Martsch prefers contemplation and resignation, in patterns that are more reminiscent of the Eastern religions than of rock and roll. His guitar, on the other hand, continuously embroiders textures so intense and dark that they emanate a nearly transcendental quality. Often, the guitar is a faint but continuous moan, as if Tom Verlaine had run out of breath to scream.

The psychedelic flight Randy Described Eternity, set in the most metaphysical garden of Syd Barrett, prepares the way for the step to the Neil Young neurosis of I Would Hurt a Fly (and its waves of strings). The eight minutes of the martial and tender Velvet Waltz, which sways between the abrasive fuzz of tiptoeing cellos and possessed wah-wah, are the yin to the yang of the nine-minute Untrustable Part 2, which suddenly jumps into a pit of angular, whooping agreements and syncopated time (but it ends with a surreal fanfare). Stop the Show is almost a classic of hardrock. It must be counted among the most articulate and formally impeccable compositions in modern rock.

These are not songs, but instead layers of sound morphed from individual existences into an existential song cycle. Made Up of Dreams is exemplary of this regard. It skips between the litany of the psychedelic band, the schizoid of Neil Young, to classical pop, and then finally into a dissonant jam. Out of Site oscillates between a simpering lullaby and a hard-rock charge.

The complexity of their scores does no decrease on Keep It like a Secret (WB, 1998), bit the melodies are subservient. The album is still epic, and it replicates the size of the previous free-form jams onto a more human dimension: relaxed, laid back, and oriented to the song form. The guitar “sings” in the airy Carry the Zero, and it modulates the “waltz” in You Were Right. The hurricane-like lyrics of Martsch are, however, someone clipped from politics to bring out the chorus of the jovial Center of the Universe or the cute Sidewalk. The dreamy Else is, in truth, most suited to a Paul McCartney. What remains is the instrumental The Plan and the solemn crescendo that opens Time Trap. IT is in these moments that Martsch coins a new musical language that is spiritual, cathartic, and cosmic.

Over time, Martsch proves himself as one of the greatest poets of rock guitar.

Nelson had already recorded Building Distrust From Trust (1994) and Distorted Retarded Peculiar (1996) with his first band, Butterfly Train.

Live (Warner Bros, 2000) is a titanic live album with 20-minute long versions of their classics and their favorite covers. Only the Grateful Dead could achieve this kind of emotional intensity with such abstract guitar jams. For Ancient Melodies Of The Future (Warner Bros, 2001), featuring Heatmiser's keyboardist Sam Coomes, add "subsonic" to the usual sub-adjectives used to describe their art (subtle, subdued, subliminal, etc). Doug Martsch hits new peaks of catchiness with Strange, somewhere between the Kinks and the L7, the dramatic and martial Trimmed and Burning (his nth take on Neil Young), and the speedy, naive Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss. Song structures are often creative without being unpleasant: Happiness blends REM litany and southern boogie, the psychedelic rigmarole of In Your Mind flirts with early Pink Floyd, You Are is a sentimental ballad that explodes in guitar fireworks. They are a musician's delight: only repeated listening and zen-like concentration reveal the subtleties of Martsch's tones and words. A little too relaxed, it occasionally slides into moronic Beatlesian pop (The Host, Alarmed). Built To Spill seem to have lost their artistic ambitions and settled for a middle-of-the-road sound.

Relocated to Louisiana and re-educated to the blues guitar , Doug Martsch recorded an acoustic-guitar album, Now You Know (Warner Bros, 2002), his personal tribute to old folk and blues records, that offers subdued/subtle brainy meditations on music such as Heart and Impossible, not too different from Built To Spill's music, just devoid of all the abstract/metaphysical doodling.

Built To Spill seemed suddenly revitalized on You In Reverse (Warner Bros, 2006), which also happened to sound like a much more personal statement by its leader (even more personal than his own solo album). This album marked the return to the science of abstract jamming that had suffered greatly after Keep It Like A Secret. The nine-minute opener Goin' Against Your Mind (a pulsing lattice of minimalist repetition, hard-rocking progressions, viscous phrasing and post-shoegazing guitar solos), Wherever You Go (that begins with an epic interplay worthy of Lynyrd Skynyrd and boasts the most memorable riff of the album), and the dreamy Just a Habit are permeated by pensive transcendence and manic depression. Martsch's guitar has a unique way to penetrate the inner core of a song's melody and turn it into a chatartic experience, frequently upsetting the original mission (notably in the last two ska-infected minutes of Mess With Time). Even the more dynamic (and radio-friendly) songs (Liar, Conventional Wisdom, The Wait) cannot escape the inevitable emotional massacre. The mood of the album is better embodied by the shortest song, the funereal Saturday. Marstch's tormented solos are the antidote to an era that strives for simplicity and superficiality.

There Is No Enemy (2009) was a minor effort that sounded as if it had been extorted from a reluctant artist. Devoid of any of the metaphysical jams that were the trademark of Built To Spill, the album contents itself with the mellow country-pop of Hindsight and with the atmospheric solo of Good Ol' Boredom. The numerous guests (Quasi's Sam Coomes, Treepeople's Scott Schmaljohn, Butthole Surfers' Paul Leary, John McMahon, Roger Manning) make it feel more like a salon of intellectual friends than a rock album.

Untethered Moon (2015), Built to Spill's first album five years, featured a new rhythm section, with drummer Steve Gere and bassist Jason Albertini. The sound of the roaring All Our Songs, the psych-country On the Way and the poppy Never Be the Same was rather subdued by Doug Martsch's standards, and the dissonant jam When I'm Blind was hardly groundbreaking.

After the tribute album Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston (2018), Martsch recorded When the Wind Forgets Your Name (2022) which is de facto a solo album with occasional collaborators. The songs are simple and melodic, but perhaps the first three would have sufficed (the catchy stoner-rock of Gonna Lose, the dreamy and Beatles-esque Fool's Gold and the stately Understood). The eight-minute Comes a Day is an interesting composition, a cross of Merseybeat and southern-rock, of the Kinks and the Outlaws.