Strummer521

It's funny, The Built to Spill guys seem be taking their cue from grunge, even though by 1997, grunge had petered out. I think their guitar parts pretty much perpetually recall Dinosaur Jr. But they have a sense of melodic counterpoint that a lot of their forefathers lacked. They tack surprising twists onto the end of vocal and guitar melodies alike that seem to betray an affinity for Elliott Smith. I find myself wishing that the drummer would drink a little less cough syrup (in other words, play like he's in a rock band and not a waltzes only specialty group) though I did dig his loping approximation of the amen breakbeat on "I Would Hurt a Fly." This is an album of complex modern rock grooves at their apex, but it requires careful, multiple listens to tease them out from under the dense layer of familiarity and pop melodies that sit on top of the sound. What's really beautiful and huge is the shifting kaleidoscope of movements through which each song drifts while keeping its core so completely intact and the many snatches of lyrics that are dumb and cliched enough to be wonderfully, perfectly anthemic in a rock context and which peek out of the fog at the best moments for them to show.

I was quite prejudiced against this album at first listen, because I've been bathing my brain in electronic music almost exclusively for the past three or four months. I felt there was nothing interesting you could do with just the old standby of drums and guitars. But this reminds me: it's cliche for a reason, and sometimes a limitation of options like that one forces an artist to push as far as he can within those walls. And the production is so dense that the guitar lines tangle together and force you to use your ears and brain in a very focused way to pick all of them out. It's an assembly of an array of unremarkable elements that come together in just the right way to make something which is, in fact, remarkable.

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