More Velvet Waltz than Randy Described Eternity?

Look up their song Car to get a general idea of what they tend to lean towards.

Ah, they sound a lot like Death Cab For Cutie. I've heard them listed as influences.

I'll get to listening to it in the mo'nin.

Ya I don't have time now, I got finals tomorrow :(

I'll listen to after finals.

I have really never been able to get into Perfect From Now On as much as the other BTS stuff. I love Keep It Like a Secret, some truly incredible songwriting and guitar work.

And "Randy Described Eternity" is a good song, but my memories of it have been totally ruined from a BTS show I went to earlier this year. Their encore was a 20+ minute jam of "Randy Described Eternity" that was intolerable. Jesus, it was bad. The rest of the show was horrible to, I lost a lot of respect for BTS after seeing them live :(. Meat Puppets were a great opener though.

Ethan obviously picked it because this is my favorite Built to Spill album :p:. The guitar part at 4:07 in I Would Hurt a Fly is pretty much how I fell in love with them. That hit is just sooo perfect. It gets me excited every single time. Stop the Show the biggest and best oversimplification of what they are. Epic indie pop. And the opening vocals for Made Up Dreams are oh sooo good. Built to Spill covered Free Bird on 9/10/01. Coincidence? I think not.

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.

Well this was quite lovely.
Strummer has a point with the Dinosaur Jr comparison, the main dealio with this are layers to their music, especially on the outro on Velvet Waltz, it soars at the start and then sucks you in like all good psychedelica does. The rocky bit in the middle of I Would Hurt A Fly is another highlight.
I can see why they get likened to Modest Mouse, very similar, but this lot are far more, well, i suppose epic. With a bit more listening i could be more than happy to say they're just as good.

Piss Me Off reminds me that I should note (and reply with my thoughts soon...) they're Modest Mouse's biggest influence next to the Pixies so when you listen to Modest Mouse you hear Built to Spill not the other way around. I'll post my thoughts later today instead of at the end of the week.