Destiny is vulgar

 we have grown up

My friend Eric asked me to write a review of Built to Spill’s new album, There Is No Enemy, over a month ago. It’s not that I’ve been busy, but BTS’s new album took me a month of listening to in order to wade through the emotional baggage of my time with Keep it Like a Secret. I’ve been hungover from that incredibly pussiant album for years now, and I regard it as the most perfect post-grunge power-pop album ever made. Its surgically mathematic melodies effulgent with nuclear-force power chords and timeless lyrics still fill me with a sublime buzz after thousands of listens. And as, regrettably, my musical attention span for new material grows shorter, I find myself more and more retreating to the music of my past.

built-to-spill-there-is-no.jpgSo once a month I’ll download something new so my musical horizons don’t narrow too quickly, and after the first listen to There is No Enemy, I didn’t know how to feel. I wanted what Keep it Like a Secret gave me: I wanted the music to spirit my wings to great deeds. The cacophonous joy of Secret made me run faster, paint better, write longer. It inspired and motivated me, and isn’t that what a listener truly wants from their favorite music, a kind of ecstasy, a brief touch with divinity, a connection to the mediator of the inexpressible?

But Enemy, on that first listen, didn’t do that. I still felt the potency of Doug Marsh’s guitars, the driving rhythms, the circular arrangement, but something had changed, something was different. I couldn’t put my finger on it. And I have to admit that initially I was disappointed, but since I told Eric I’d do it, (and I’ve flaked on him in the past) I went ahead and burned a cd and put it in my car and listened to it wherever I went.

The first song, Aisles 13, begins with the trademark tentative and singular notes, as if feeling out its audience, before a grand sonic assault that eventually settles into a major chord pattern with the opposing guitar leads exchange blows like fighters trading a head kick and right crosses, grinning, and moving back in for another attack. Enter lyrics:

Know what good you’ve done?

Seems like I’m just done,

No one can be on

all sides at once

Everyday something strange  

I can’t explain happens to me

Often I am called by name

To clean up Ailse 13

We hear a classic BTS riff, a bouncing, taunting harmony between guitar and voice, and the band’s distinct sound is unmistakable, yet refined. Fugacious and punchy, the first song concludes in a stifled burst of sound and fury.

Next comes Hindsight, one of BTS’s tunes I classify as one of their mellow summer songs. A smooth, easy flowing song fleshing out Marsh’s feelings about the trap of memory and how it can transmute our personal narratives into unhealthy crutches we lean on to feel better about ourselves. Like if the coach had only put Napoleon’s Dynamite’s Uncle Remo into the game, the team would have won the playoffs. He toes the line between faded memories, promises and lies.

The third track starts with a slow riff that sounds like it could be off of the new Wilco album.

Well the stakes of the game seem fine

So you lost after al this time

Has to make you cry

But you don’t and you don’t know why 

I have to admit this song is a bit to slow and morose for me. It’s piece that, after a pot brownie, might feel uber-meaningful, but the aimless quality is something I don’t like to dwell in. The title, Nowhere Lullubye, certainly seems suitable. But it could simply be a calm before the storm device BTS uses to intensify the impact of what comes next.   

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This was an early favorite, one that harkened back to the dueling lead harmonies of the past, Good Old Boredom, track 4. The hook was sweet as sunshine, the beat driving; with plenty of background pedal effects, surprise bridges, and a great build up and release. I listened to it repeatedly and enjoyed it, then drifted into the later tracks, and noticed that after I got out of the car and walked into work or into my house later, something strange was happening. I was thinking about the songs, what they were saying, little snippets of verse. No longer was Doug throwing together poignant ballad titles in clever and enjoyable ways with tongue in cheek winks. Now he delved deeply into philosophical ideas of love and god, plumbing the depths of our perceptions of reality. He was approaching complicated psychological issues in a mature and minimal way.

I had figured out what was different: Built to Spill had grown up, and with them I realize I’ve grown up too (Go out during the week? Can’t make it.). I’m chewing on these songs like warm gristle from a fat ribeye. Instead of being knocked out, like I’d hoped to be, I’m really thinking: do I like this? Why do I like this? As a child I hated tomatoes, onions, squash and spinach, but as an adult I know they’re good for me and through healthy effort I’ve grown to love them. Could this be the healthy new music I resist because it doesn’t bring instant satisfaction? I kept listening.

The darkly plodding Oh Yeah, track 6, brings up Marsh’s crisis with the idea of faith with lyrics like:

And if God
Does exist
I am sure He
Will forgive
Me for doubting Him
For He'd see
How unlikely He
Made Himself seem

Oh Yeah is immediately followed by the urgent beat and growling riffs of Pat. Rapt with frission, the track is a buzz-saw spewing notes this way and that like sawdust raining on a shop floor. If Oh Yeah was Marsh staring at the midnight sky and wondering, Pat had him sprinting through a minefield with machine guns strafing the perimeter.

The band finds a happy medium on the track 8, Done. The slow rise and fall of a phaser pedal gives this song a sprawling, flowing feel, as if the played from an old sailing ship rolling on white-crested waves across an endless ocean of contemplation.

“Loneliness is getting hard to perceive…

Everyday we step into some disease…

It’s forgiven, it’s for you…

The theme of forgiveness is present in many of the albums songs, and with a title like There is No Enemy, I get the feeling that Marsh is coming to grips with the crux of an introspective life, our mistakes and the regrets that trail along behind them for years. I understand this, I can identify, and realize that I’m probably not alone, so Marsh’s mission is a completed one: he’s broadened the details of his own experiences into a universal message, and isn’t that the ultimate goal of song writing? The song’s flawless composition seamlessly frames the idea of forgiveness, one of the most complicated and powerful of human actions.

Planting Seeds, track 9, takes it up a notch. Marsh brings in opposing guitar leads, a George Harrison inspired hook laid over Built to Spill’s patented underwater tones, and we get thrown back to the old BTS “Them” song. The subject is the ubiquitous they and what they do; revisiting the clever insight used on past albums when exploring group behavior and critiquing modern society. It’s atavistic subject matter for the band, but the succulent melody accompanied by crunching guitars overdubs help it go down easy like a glass of homemade sweet tea on a humid August day in the South.

They think that they get it but they always get it wrong

They’ll play your favorite song, just to sell it to you

And just because you love something doesn’t mean it’s yours to buy

Been selling it so long no one even knows the reason why

Track 10, Things Fall Apart, changes pace again and the band goes into slow motion, mapping out the territory of failed relationships. It’s not a song a group of young guys cranks up on the way to the bar, but rather it delves into the unsounded depths of sadness that seeps out of the broken hearts of We who can’t figure out how our plans went awry. In a somnolent call and response between two of Marsh’s trademark riffs, we feel the argument, the anchor of dread that pulls us into melancholy when we see the two trains rushing at each other and are powerless to avert the catastrophe we know is inevitable. And as usual, the bands eloquent changes are seconds to none. In a despondent bridge they even introduce a horn to emphasize the longing, a pleading attempt to wake us up and remind us that every step taken can never be taken back. There is only one story of your life and not any other, there is only what you do; what you hoped to do will never exist.

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We’re ferried into the last track with the echoes of Things Fall Apart’s gentle guitar picking fading away as if through a fog, and keeping with the slow structure, Doug’s tender whine sings out:

Waiting for our answers

This cancer is common as sand

What happens here stays here

Cause no one anywhere else gives a damn

All said and done, who’s going to bother remembering?

All dead and gone…

The vocals are accompanies by a fingering of gentle guitar notes backed by a pipe organ which surrounds everything in a tremulous purgatory: will the last song on the album be an emotional drawl that fades to silence, or are we building towards something? Visualizing I see Marsh under the spotlight, singing the above verse with closed eyes, the sweat streaming down his shining bald head into the ever-present beard, and then suddenly but logically, a pedal is pressed and the band is lit up by Technicolor lights as rock n roll erupts, those men built to spill aren’t signing out without a dazzling, mercurial fuss. A fuzzed and Cobainesque guitars growls through two measures of a minor keyed progression that makes you want to downshift and pass up a bunch of inconsistent suckers on the highway. As anyone who’s written songs knows, the best ones usually come during dark nights of desperation, where one either writes or stabs the curtains with kitchen knives; each word and line acting as life buoys which we must cling to in order to keep ourselves from being dragged down by the weathers into despair. The progression continues and the narration begins: 

The more you have to live for

The more you love your life

The harder it will be for you die

And we all want to die easy

Definitely an original and the band at its best, as Marsh drives us through symphony like movements, each one different from the last in style and feel, but which match and mirror each other with precision and grace. This is a prayer to the Gods, a bell ringing out across the scintillating, starsprint sky; the Milky Way glowing in sharp relief to the surrounding vacuum, and immaculate tones that bounce off the dome of eternity. The harmonies of the lyrics and one lead guitar are challenged by the melody of another, dancing up the scales, calling out to the heavens. Obviously dealing with questions of mortality, after an effortless bridge Marsh goes on to admit:

“There is something wrong with me…”

 Here Built to Spill wrestles with the age-old problem of coming to grips with our flawed nature. The mistakes we’re bound to commit reach out to strangle our self-esteem as we stumble through a confusing and complex world. The guilt inherent in mistakes is so unforgivable, so difficult to come to grips with as natural, that we wish with our whole beings that we could take them back. Doug Marsh and company understand why one day we feel on top of the world and the next we hide the fact that we’re totally depressed. All those forks in the long road of our lives, the directions we sometimes unknowingly took, the tiny decisions that ended up changing our lives in ways that bruised our expectations of ourselves and the world forever. We want to believe that despite our deep regrets, that everything will be okay anyway. Those that have grappled with these issues will appreciate There is No Enemy, as we slowly realize that whether we like it or not, we have grown up.  

written by Austin Doyle, visit him on Facebook

 

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