Built To Spill Perfect From Now On by: Tom Bradbury Mon:21-May-07 Label: Warner Year: 1997 WB rating 71 out of 100

Kudos to Built To Spill for screwing over their major label by taking a significant departure from their usual style. Conventional wisdom dictates that if you have just scored a major record deal you don’t tinker unduly with the formula. Built to Spill are obviously not particularly bothered by conventions. Unlike their previous two albums which were full of three minute pop gems, Perfect From Now On is very much a guitar album. The average song length is around six minutes, and only one clocks in under five. It is an enigma, both frustrating and liberating. Perfect From Now On contains moments of crushing dullness alongside points of transcendent beauty and paranoid genius. As an album it is extremely elusive.

Most of the tracks are more suites than individual songs, so it is hard to really describe a song as a whole, rather it makes more sense to look at them as made up of individual parts. Sometimes the parts mesh together almost seamlessly, but there are also occasions where you can be listening to tediously dull music for minutes on end before there is any relief in a new theme. A few of Martsch’s ideas can be a bit on the monotonous side – riffs that go on endlessly with no sort of vocal augmentation to keep them interesting.

‘Stop The Show’, simply takes far too long to get to the point. Two-and-a-half minutes of droning guitars and cello, neither melodious nor powerful pass by before any sort of change occurs. The release of tension is ineffective because the melody Martsch has in store is not strong enough to warrant the drawn out build up. There is only about 30 seconds of attractive music in the entire song. 

In contrast ‘Untrustable/Part 2 (About Someone Else)’ contains far more purposeful singing and guitar parts – more like the Built to Spill of old. It’s a suite that holds together, with obvious direction from one part to the next; ‘Part 2’ transitioning into searching guitars, almost like thinking music – reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine, but with far more direct vocals. Martsch is also thoughtful lyrically, asking an unnamed subject, “what are you gonna do/can you feel the darkness shining through/what are you gonna do?”. 

Built to Spill are at their best when Martsch’s schizophrenic guitar and off kilter lyrics feed off each other’s energy, as they do on ‘I Would Hurt A Fly’. Foreboding feedback evolves into a frequency of ominous tone, as Martsch sings “I can’t get that sound you make out of my head”. There is a maelstrom of distorted guitar that echoes the chaos Martch refers to by voice: “I can't even figure out what's making it/it feels like fingernails across the moon”.

Other songs on Perfect From Now On are less consistent, divided into equal parts inspiration and the mundane. On ‘Kicked It In The Sun’, just when you are getting bored, Martsch brings in a much needed transcendent guitar lick that breaks free of the dreariness that had defined the song thus far, allowing room for a more impassioned melody. ‘Made up dreams’, features a Jerry Garcia-esque guitar solo and is probably Martsch’s best vocal performance on the album.

Personally, I miss the pop sensibility of their first two albums. While certainly epic, Perfect From Now On is not as melodically pleasing as Built To Spill’s previous work. Sometimes it feels that that the vocals are merely an afterthought, muttered while Martsch is concentrating on achieving guitar hero status with his revolving riffs. Some songs meander more than explore. If Martsch could have structured his songs a bit tighter, this could have been a far greater album than the one it is. There is no denying that he has considerable talent for ambience and lyrical ingenuity, but could perhaps benefit from learning restraint.