Built To Spill

As his band’s first album in five years looms large on the indie-gone-major horizon, Doug Martsch, lead singer and guitarist of Built To Spill, dares you to comprehend his intentions. “There is no way that a human being is going to understand another human being,” he says from his home in Idaho, regarding the inevitable cultural noise that clogs the air between artists and their audiences.

But wait. This is somebody’s husband and father talking; can he really be that hopeless about the walls between people? “I have no idea about this stuff,” he admits, laughing. “I’m probably totally wrong.”

Many of the lyrics Martsch and his wife patched together out of sometimes-random, meter-fitting phrases for the new album deal with embracing the possibility that every gesture, ideology or utterance is freighted with inaccuracies. “Most of us are wrong, most of us agree / Must have been the wrong message we received,” he sings during “Wherever You Go,” one of You In Reverse’s twin six-minute centerpieces. The other, “Conventional Wisdom,” is a screed against truthiness and the manipulation of what gets to be considered normative: Lines such as “They don’t know they’re wrong, but you know they could never concede that” build to the chorus’ “Some things you can’t explain.” Which is of course a cliché, and a surrender and a bankable koan.

Something smells like Fox News dispirit. The album’s title could work as a pun reaction to Bush’s election, since the letters in the word y-o-u, when reversed, form the query, You? Oh, why? Martsch acknowledges that portions of the new tracks are, to him, “about the administration, Republicans, right-wingers, people who spend all their time trying to deceive people. I’m definitely fired up about politics.”

So Built To Spill isn’t wholly unstrategic. “I wouldn’t say that we don’t have an agenda, because in a way we do. It’s such a weird vague thing, but our agenda is to make music,” he says. Sounds and arrangements offer Martsch a more comfortable context in which to absorb himself. But he doesn’t indulge in conscious self-encryption. “To me music can be about anything. The lyrics might mean something very specific to me, but I wouldn’t expect anyone else to get it. That’s not the point. Music itself gives the words meaning. I listened to David Bowie a ton when I was growing up, and he’s mostly just singing nonsense, but it made sense to me. I found some meaning in it.”

Martsch may distrust the concrete authority of language and its abusers, but one word that his music has helped rescue from marketplace propagandists is “epic.” His 13 years of guitartistry—17 if you count his stretch in Treepeople—definitely qualify Built To Spill for maximum rotation within the painfully imaginary Classic Indie Rock radio format. His solos and grandiose mode of tune architecture suggest a modern and exponentially less Confederate Lynryd Skynyrd; an unironic cover of “Freebird” was even a staple on the last tour.