Built to Spill
Thurs-Sat June 28-30 at the Showbox, $15.

It's the voice of a grown-up child, full of wonder and the weight of the world, and that's what has made Built to Spill an instant obsession among music fans who still want more than a quick hook and high-octane blasts of power chords. Singer and songwriter Doug Martsch has been blessed with an elastic vocal ability to wrench emotion out of the most honest and deceptively simple lyric in a way that a thousand hammy Boltons could never understand. His is a voice that lopes and spills and rails and embraces--it rushes forth and, like a child, rarely holds back.

At a recent party for a local business, Martsch and his bandmates Bret Nelson and Scott Plouf might have seemed oddly out of place among the suits and industry bigwigs in attendance. Our beleaguered mayor shook hands with other so-called VIPs, and a publication struggling to reinvent itself tried desperately to appear vital by using corporate money to throw a celebration featuring a band that made people feel special to have been invited. That night, Built to Spill played a set studded with songs that the band doesn't often indulge its fans in during sold-out concerts; and while I was elated to hear a few personal favorites, I also felt a little sick, and guilty, at having paid nothing to see a show that millions of equally passionate fans would gladly have paid a lot of money to experience.

But then a couple of weeks later, I received the advance of the band's seventh album, and I realized that Martsch was trying to give the audience--and it was just that, after all--the best show he could that night, and this new album, the prophetically titled Ancient Melodies of the Future, is more of the same for everyone else.

Built to Spill has never looked like a band that could inspire so much adulation and devotion, even in an era where dressing down has become the uniform of alternative rock. Bearded and wholly Northwest in his appearance, Martsch is quiet and genuine, so much so that the occasional biting lyric is almost shocking when you consider the gentleness of the man and the resplendent quality of his voice. Ancient Melodies of the Future is perhaps the Built to Spill album that most effectively and authentically captures Martsch's essence as not only a talented songwriter and bandleader, but as a person, husband, and father. "Strange" opens the disc, immediately setting the mood for what is to come: a collection of songs that wonder but shrug rather than try to come to terms with their place in the world.

"It's strange, but what's so strange about that?... Let's call us a truce and call it the truth," he sings as a keyboard bounces in neither-here-nor-there commitment. The gorgeous "Hand It Over" possesses a nostalgic, string-laden ache of almost ELO proportions (think Eldorado), and that's just two songs in. "Alarmed" is equally devastating, soaring in scope and ruminative in tone; the first line, "In the hurry of the past I forgot to make it last," warns the listener that Martsch is about to unleash another of his instantly galvanizing, quiet epics.

It has been said that in the studio this time around, Martsch eased up a bit on his fabled perfectionism, and that loosening of grip upon his own craft is readily evident in the simple beauty of this new album and the way songs rely on melodies rather than textures to carve a deep groove in the listener's soul. The rangy guitar wing-outs that had all but taken over the band's landscape are pruned and neatly trained, allowing the color of each song to come through rather than become lost in the brambles. Martsch's guitar still surges and constantly surprises, but throughout Ancient Melodies of the Future, it's as if he was interested in nothing more than creating a pure example of what Built to Spill is all about. Just listen to "You Are," a song constructed around the single line, "Everybody knows that you are," and marvel at its complex, simple symbolism.