Built to Spill-- Perfect From Now On (Warner Bros. 946453) Recalcitrant minstrel Doug Martsch has never sounded especially original-- the appeal of Built to Spill has always derived from equal parts wry, catchy verses and equal parts familiar, though inspired, guitar work. Now, with BTS's major-label debut, one gets the feeling that Martsch has been holed up too long in his Boise home, recharting onto guitar the territories mined by experimental prog outfits like Tortoise, et al. Which is to say that on "Perfect From Now On," Martsch stretches the possibilities of the swirling song suite, with guitar melodies that consistently shift and evolve at the very point you'd expect them to wither and fade. Whereas BTS's last studio album, 1994's "There's Nothing Wrong With Love," sounded like dizzying prozac-pop, Perfect deals with graver, weightier concerns: "I'm gonna be perfect from now on / I'm going to perfect starting now," Martsch declares emptily on the opening track, "Randy Described Eternity," setting himself up for a disappointment that carries through the rest of the album. Martsch forges through a dreamy, psychedelic soundscape, where mellotrons and cellos recur to serve as jumping off points for epic guitar embellishments. But don't expect to become instantly familiar with the album's song structures; "Perfect"'s eight tracks clock in at over a total of 54 minutes. The effect is that Martsch invites but ultimately refuses to pull listeners into his songs, so the spiraling hooks tend to linger in the back of your head, instead of on the tip of your tongue. On "Out of Site," the songwriter laments "What a sight, what a sound / What a way to bring people down / What a way to bring me down / It goes on and on," in a voice that's as caustic as it is whiny. And like the last line, his songs go on and on, always entrancing and resonant, never anticlimactic.
--- Stephen Head