Built to Spill @ 9:30 Club
Fresh from a stay in the Catskills playing this year’s New York installment of All Tomorrow’s Parties, Built To Spill came to town last night with just one album in its repertoire for the evening. The trend of playing classic albums in their entirety continues to grow, particularly with ATP’s Don’t Look Back series initiating so many such shows for their festivals. And if you’re going to spend time rehearsing the whole record, might as well take it on the road rather than just keep it for the one festival, right? It’s lucky that BTS decided not to limit their performances of 1997’s Perfect from Now On just to the ATP festival date; last night’s 9:30 Club crowd was treated to a performance that infused the decade-old record with renewed vigor.
Before we got to the main event, though, there were two excellent openers, starting with Australia’s The Drones, who woke everyone up from the post-office doldrums with a screeching ball of amphetamine blues, singer Gareth Liddiard’s snarl reminiscent of a feral Nick Cave over top of a messy blend of feedback and guitar scrabble. Then it was time for '90s casualties the Meat Puppets, the brothers Kirkwood resurrected after Cris’s long-time-coming victory over his many addictions. Despite all their time apart over the past decade, Cris and Curt still seem like two guys who have spent the better part of a half century playing music together. On a set that ranged from high-energy hardcore to cowpunk to lazy psychedelics, they played with a nearly effortless connection. The highlight came during a speedy Irish-tinged run through of "Waltzing Matilda" that would have done the Pogues proud. The Drones were invited back out on stage to dance and sing choruses, and they very likely put their visas in jeopardy by beheading a cardboard effigy of President Bush and then slashing the body to pieces with a knife. Those Aussies don’t mess around.
Image courtesy Julian Sanchez
Built to Spill came on stage in typically unassuming fashion, Doug Martsch acting as his own roadie, setting up his equipment and array of guitar pedals. There was no big entrance, lights dimming or anything of that nature. They finished setting up, tuned, and got right down to business with side one, track one, "Randy Described Eternity". Now, the worry with any Built to Spill show is that Martsch and company might submit too much to their jammy tendencies and launch into 20 minute indie rock guitar hero space jams that might embarrass even the Grateful Dead. The nice surprise of the night is that, for the main set anyway, the band played with a relentless economy and focus. Sure, the songs were long, but they’re long on the record. What they weren’t were endlessly meandering instrumentals in search of a point.
Most songs remained extremely faithful to the album versions, with only two, "Velvet Waltz" and closer "Untrustable/Part 2 (About Someone Else)" extending significantly beyond their recorded running times. The result was a show that perfectly distilled the tunefulness and energy inherent in what is sometimes derided as the band's most self-indulgent and least hook-laden record. Martsch's vocals, pushed right out in front of an otherwise bass-heavy mix, provided a simple bedrock of melody that grounded the busy instrumentals. There's so much going on in Perfect from Now On that it's easy to forget how tuneful it is, even if it lacks the pop gems of There's Nothing Wrong with Love or Keep It Like a Secret. Those vocal melodies have a crystalline urgency that is magnified when you're in the same room as Martsch, whose head bobs and weaves as if the words are shaking and wrestling themselves from his body, eager to hit listeners' ears in that distinctive yearning tenor.
Live, the songs sounded more immediate and dynamic than they ever have on record. Martsch has been up front about the fact that this album's songs were written less as songs than as multiple parts cobbled together. Perfect from Now On is like eight sonic Frankenstein's monsters, and while the joints and stitches are always visible, each song hangs together remarkably well. Slow building crescendos cap many of the songs, never drawing out the finish for the sake of extending things, but always with a laser sight on the ultimate climax and release of these sections, which were ten times as ferocious onstage as listeners are used to.
A little patience was tested in the closer, as a 9 minute track was stretched out to 16, but very few gave up and left. Those who did leave missed out, as the band came back out for the encore to provide stylistic contrast in the form of Built to Spill's most perfect and simple three-minute pop song, "Car". It was after this that they decided to indulge. They began a cover of the Halo Benders' "Virginia Reel Around the Fountain". Though can it really be called a cover when it's just a song from another band that Martsch has been in? There was plenty of time to ponder this question, as the song ended up playing out into a 20+ minute jam that, unlike the Perfect from Now On songs, did meander, particularly in the last five minutes or so. Add to that the fact that Martsch's guitar, an attraction second only to his voice, was now buried under the two lead guitarists, and it was at this point that people started trickling out. Still, the band had kept things tightly focused for over 90 minutes prior, so allowing them to close out the show that way seemed a small concession considering that things really had been nearly perfect from then back to the beginning.