Built to Spill
I first encountered Built to Spill not through their records but live, sandwiched between Sleater-Kinney and Sonic Youth at the 1997 Bumbershoot festival in Seattle. I expected them to be good–after all, they’d been bequeathed second place in that pinch-me lineup by Thurston Moore himself. But I sure as hell didn’t expect them to blow both the deafeningly hyped openers and the veteran headliners off the stage.
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That’s just what they did, though: Drummer Scott Plouf, bassist Brett Nelson, and singer-guitarist Doug Martsch walked onstage and, with all the effort of a shrug, threw down a truly great set of pop songs. The lyrics were devastatingly spot-on (“I used her and she used me / But we never once had sex / All we ever had was too much time”), couched in one championship melody after another, with guitar lines that unraveled like a snagged sweater. On and on they went,mesmerizing and sinewy and impatiently rhythmic, stomping all over the sacred indie rule that solos suck like a sticky effects pedal. They unleashed one bracing, tuneful roar after another, punctuated with possibly the most sincere thank-yous ever heard from a stage.
Keep It Like a Secret is the first Built to Spill record to feature the same rhythm section as the last Built to Spill record, and the stability translates into a new confidence. Plouf’s measured kit-bashing and Nelson’s deep countermelodies are as intuitive and focused as rock ‘n’ roll has sounded this decade, even in that other all-in-one-package trio from the Pacific Northwest, Nirvana. Built to Spill is not quite the rocket Nirvana was–Plouf isn’t Dave Grohl, and even if he were, he wouldn’t have room to prove it, since Martsch’s songs don’t swing, musically or moodwise, as hard as Kurt Cobain’s. But they move pretty damn elegantly nevertheless. And when they’re on–when they all lock into a groove, as on the stunning fadeout of “Carry the Zero,” which rivals the ending of the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On” for sheer ass-shaking intensity–they achieve liftoff.
