http://www.ocweekly.com/2010-07-08/music/built-to-spill-doug-martsch/2
Music
Our 5 Picks For Lightning In A Bottle
By Chris Ziegler
Built to Spill Milk Their History
Founder Doug Martsch's storied past comes out in the band's songs
Comments (0) By JEFF STRATTON Thursday, Jul 8 2010
Even though Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch sounds proud of his band’s newest
album, There Is No Enemy, he’s aware of its typical critical appraisal. “First good
record they’ve made since the 1990s,” he mockingly spits in a dumb-ass drawl.
Max Neutra
That isn’t altogether true. Still, there’s not much doubt among fans and critics
that, following a pair of stunning successes at the end of the past decade, the
band Martsch founded in 1992 hit a creative speed bump.
Those late-’90s sets (Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like a Secret) provided
Built to Spill a template called Building a Better Indie Rock: shitloads of epic
sprawl, monumentally affecting melodic passages, guitar superheroism galore,
while somehow adhering to an economy of means that kept eight-minute songs
from anything approaching tedium.
But on the heels of those near-unstoppable masterpieces, the path led directly
down.
Thereafter, the story goes, the sprawl turned less epic, with too much fat
replacing tender meatiness. Martsch had a lot of catching up to do if he wanted
to revisit his artistic summit.
“You know, that doesn’t really bother me,” he says. “I know what nonsense it is,
so I don’t take it seriously.” But he admits to panic and frustration in the studio. “I
want to do something that’s more than just okay, you know? And when I’m in
between records, there have been times I don’t have a lot of confidence.”
That lack of confidence resulted in downtime, helping to create the impression
Martsch was burned out on Built to Spill. True, projects bubbled up from the
pipeline, such as a live album in 2000 that Martsch says he was against
releasing (“A live album should sound rumbly, distorted and weird,” he says, “and
that one didn’t”). Largely thanks to a 20-minute take on Neil Young’s “Cortez the
Killer,” the band earned a reputation for long-winded wankery.
Two years later, Martsch confounded fans with Now You Know, a solo album that
would have fit better on a boutique label but was released on Warner Bros.,
home of Built to Spill since 1995. Heavy on acoustic slide guitar, it took
inspiration from the likes of Mississippi Fred McDowell and shared none of the
stratospherics of his erstwhile band. That detour, coupled with the indifferent
response to 2001’s Ancient Melodies of the Future (as well as his own quotes in
the press), has Martsch more or less admitting that stuff such as kids, basketball
and life got in the band’s way for a while.
“A lot of people don’t want to hear that. They have this vision that artists are in
this world of self-sacrifice, creating art. And it’s not like that for me,” he says
unapologetically. “But I might stretch how positive I am because that’s what they
expect. I don’t want to disillusion people, but I also don’t want to blow smoke up
their ass.”
Martsch does regret statements he has made about his lyrics (always among
Built to Spill’s best attributes) having little or no meaning.
“I wish I hadn’t said that because the lyrics are painstakingly dealt with. If they
weren’t important, I wouldn’t work as hard on them,” he says. He then lowers his
voice: “I just didn’t want to talk about what they meant.”
On There Is No Enemy, fragments pop out at listeners like lyrical Whac-a-Moles.
On the ballad “Life’s a Dream,” this line stands up and out: “Finally decided/and
by ‘decide,’ I mean ‘accept.’” And is that a mariachi trumpet jumping into the mix?
“Pat,” the shortest, angriest song on the record, circles back to the punk roots of
Treepeople, Martsch’s Boise-based predecessor to Built to Spill. Martsch says he
still dreams about his old bandmate, bassist Pat Brown, who committed suicide a
decade ago. “Well, that song,” he says, “is about missing a dead person—and
still having dreams about them.”
Martsch sounds like he’s taking more musical chances on Enemy. Opener “Aisle
13” starts with a percolating synth, and the soaring seven-minute closing track,
“Tomorrow,” is buoyed both by strings and optimism: “The more you have to live
for/the more you love your life.” And only here, in the fading minutes, does
Martsch’s six-string finally blast forth some rather wanklicious cacophony.
And that’s another thing he’d like to clear up. Martsch’s reputation as a guitar god
frustrates him, he says. “I’m really a mediocre guitar player,” he insists.
Fortunately for us, there’s ample evidence to the contrary.
Built to Spill perform with Kings of Leon and Features at the Verizon Wireless
Amphitheater, 8808 Irvine Center Dr., Irvine, (949) 855-8095
begin_of_the_skype_highlighting
(949) 8558095
end_of_the_skype_highlighting; www.livenation.com. Wed.; see website
for show time. $36.50-$66.50. All ages.
This article appeared in print as "Built to Last: A two-decade catalog has Built to
Spill taking more chances than ever."
Rick Gershon
Warner Bros. Records Publicity
3300 Warner blvd.
Burbank, CA. 91505
818-953-3473
rick.gershon@wbr.com