BIG OTHER

Though I’ve been an avid listener of their music for years, listening to each of their albums repeatedly throughout that time, including Doug Martsch’s myriad projects outside the band, it’s surprising even to me that I’d never seen them before their show at the Music Hall, although I have listened to more than a few bootlegs of some of their performances, so I wasn’t completely unprepared for the sonic onslaught, the aural melancholy, the translation of some of their compressed compositions into incredibly dynamic, organic elaborations, and also for the many sprawling caterwauls that would ensue over the course of the evening.

So to commemorate the occasion, keeping in mind those of you unable to make it, I’ve attempted to recreate the show, as best as I can a week or so after the fact, below. But first some thoughts about their name: I hadn’t thought about it before, but the name, bookended by the rhyming ill sounds (those sounds, perhaps even evoking the idea of illness) suggests a kind of self-effacing resignation, or perhaps it’s an acceptance of their music’s, their own, and, by extension, our own, devolution, spilling being something you’d normally not want to happen, in other words the “we are” is elliptically dropped in what would be the full name of the band, that is, “We Are Built to Spill,” and then, subsequently, by dropping the “we are,” they noun the verb phrase—clever, that.

They opened with “Traces,” the second track from You in Reverse, released on April 11, 2006. And it’s a perfect introduction to the band as it showcases intricate weavings of catchy riffs, this section subsequently exploding into a voluptuous instrumental interlude, which some would call a jam, but there’s very little improvisation here; it is needling without noodling, the whole song providing a glimpse of Martsch’s skewed view of his surroundings, a view that considers the membrane between the real and the irreal as anything but solid, empathizing with the difficulty of being able to tell where one ends and “where the world begins,” a world where simply avoiding assimilation is “the best you can do.” He concludes that “though the parts of it that matter change, all traces disintegrate.”

If I understand the phrase “improvising Kaufman style” in the song “Reasons” to mean acting like Andy Kaufman, that is, breaking out of character, then it once again emphasizes Martsch’s belief that the border between fantasy and reality are negligible at best. Asserting his cluelessness, Martsch asks how the other, whomever he’s talking to and about, changes “the colors, shapes, and size.” It’s also a love song, of course, the lover, after all, saying, “You arrive and I’m on fire.” The final instrumental section in performance struck me as even more languid and melancholic than its original recorded version.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Martsch is obsessed with ontological questions, and “the tricks we play with human brains.” What’s real anyway? he seems to ask over and over again. What does it mean for a being to be? What’s an object, anyway? He’s overly concerned with the features of what he sees, about what’s essential, as opposed to merely incidental or accidental, to whatever he’s looking at, to whatever he’s examining, this question exemplified in the line, from “Hindsight,” their third song of the evening: “Is that grass just greener ’cause it’s fake?”

“Kicked It in the Sun” is another song brimming with uneasiness, the person in the song finding no consolation in being “special in other ways, ways our mothers appreciate,” that idea, or rather, “that net,” bringing no sense of safety, since “all those holes [in the net] make [him] nervous.” This song features a blistering bluesy solo that leads, for a final pass, to the song’s recurring chord progression before it shifts, accelerates in the band’s idiosyncratic fashion.

“Can you make it real, make it more than will, more than just feel?” Martsch sings in “Distopian [sic] Dream Girl,” a song that also pays homage to David Bowie. The real highlight to this song, however, is the impassioned bridge that reached fever pitch live—there’s just something about hearing a couple hundred people sing, “Without me there’s nothing / I’m the only thing that dies / If it came down to your life or mine / I would do the stupid thing,” that is simply overwhelming, and then for all those same people to whisperingly repeat the refrain, “And let you keep on living,” made it one of the more creepier moments in the concert.

“Strange” utilizes repetition to great effect, exemplified, first, in the repetition of the word “strange,” culminating in the lines, “And it’s strange, but not all that strange. / Yeah, it’s strange, but what’s so strange about that? / Yeah, it’s strange but what isn’t strange? / Yeah, it’s strange, but oh well.” And then there’s the lingering on the single chord in the instrumental section, the numbing repetition alleviated by a pummeling on another chord, a much longer repetition tapering into the section, where, the rest of the band falling out, the drummer plays a repetitive beat, leading to the pretty melodic filigrees that carry the song to its end.

An iteration of the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” Doug Martsch, in “Life’s a Dream,” sang “Life ain’t nothing but a dream, / realistic as it seems.” The song is definitely evocative of childhood, or at least my own romanticized, idealized recollection of it, idealized because as much as childhood may be characterized by its purity, its blurring of fantasy and reality, it may also be characterized by fear and uncertainty, and a certain degree of powerlessness in the face of the more powerful adults daily hovering over each child. Listening to their live performance, I missed the Beatlesque la, la, las in the choruses found on their original recording of “Life’s a Dream”.

“Time Trap” is one of my favorite songs by Built to Spill. I love how the song begins with an instrumental section, lasting as long as many pop songs, how it shifts into a funky section for the verses and choruses, only to move into the concluding double-time section, featuring sliding guitar lines.

Their cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” was a major disappointment, for two reasons: first, because their interpretation amounted to little, especially compared to some other covers I’ve heard from them, like Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” and Brian Eno’s “Third Uncle,” covers that bring a distinctive twist to the song covered, and second, because this song took the slot of any number of songs they could have performed like “You Were Right,” which I’m still perplexed they didn’t play, it being one of their best songs; and they didn’t even play it at their second and final show in New York City, the following night (alas, a show I had to miss).

You’ve got to love a song that teaches you how to play it. As Martsch explains, “Joyride” “only has three chords and they are A and E and D, / they are A and E and D, / then it goes to B minor, D, uh, A, E, D.” A largely unexceptional song in its original recorded incarnation, it takes on an energetic and worthily punkish vibe live. Actually my favorite part of the song is when the rest of the band drops out, allowing Martsch to strum for three bars, the drummer and Martsch then playing the same rhythmic figure: duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, bringing the band back in. And the searing solo at the end certainly more than lifts this rather perfunctory (at least in its original version) tune up from its rather uninteresting form.

“Else” is another song that foregrounds resignation as a kind of evolution. As Martsch sings, “Finally I don’t mind / worthless tries at finding something else.” To say that something is pretty probably does more for the person saying it than for the person hearing it, or reading it, but it’s the best way to describe the way the guitar lines in this song mirror each verse’s melody as well as the rapid bending melodies following each verse.

“Carry that Zero,” the last song before the encores, found Martsch once again negotiating the divide between subject and object. How do you actually carry a zero, anyway? It’s a song about fracture, addressing someone who has “become a fraction of the sum, / the middle and the front.” After the final line: “Afraid that it’ll all fall apart,” the band delivers one of its most powerful instrumental breakdowns, the three guitars weaving around each other, only to ebulliently come together for a full minute and a half of something like euphoria.

With its title, “Stop the Show” would perhaps have been the best song with which to end the show. But it really doesn’t matter where this song is placed since it’s another of Built to Spill’s best songs. It features a tremolo-drenched country and western instrumental introduction that’s disrupted by a piercing psychedelic guitar onslaught devolving into feedback frenzy, solidifies into a rocking series of snotty accusations, and erupts into a grunge assault.

“Car,” the night’s penultimate song, begins rather plaintively only to veer off into mayhem, a trademark of the band. And once again we find Martsch pricking that membrane between fantasy and reality, tweaking it even further by wanting to “see movies of [his] dreams.”

While admittedly still annoyed that they didn’t perform “You Were Right,” I was happy that they played “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain” from Martsch’s project The Halo Benders, a song once again confronting the subject/object problem, that is, first, what do we know? and second, how do we know what we know? Both questions epitomized in the line: “How can that be in your solid state?” Martsch’s answer to the unspoken answer offered is this wonderful mantra: “Don’t say no, just say you don’t know.” I’d wear a t-shirt with that written on it.