“Susan,” Dan Bejar sings, “sipping sherry, branded by moonlight’s just a game people are playing tonight. Seriously, terror advances. So…” And with those delicate words of warning minor keys dance some sort of celebration, a paean to loving one another while the world keeps eroding. A soft mountain of synthesizer rises up around Bejar’s craggy voice, which finds its home while groaning amidst the manic drumming and arpeggios, which slide atop one another like so many lizards on a windowpane. (more…)

If you don’t know someone—I mean really know them in the sense that you’ve made some emotional connection with them, gone out drinking with them, had that mystical one-night stand with them, sat on a back porch playing guitar with them, even if only once—if you haven’t warmed your cold hands on another person’s soul, can you really care what happens to them? If you have looked, however quickly, into a person’s heart and tried to understand them, how can you possibly turn away when that person is in pain? (more…)

In 1997, Boise, ID, guitar-stretchers Built to Spill released Perfect From Now On, a sprawling record that patches together bits of Neil Young guitar, Pink Floyd atmospherics and singer Doug Martsch’s star-gazing lyrics, with melodies to match. Though they had already released a couple of well-received indie pop records that caught the ear of Isaac Brock, who went on to form Modest Mouse, it was Perfect From Now On that launched Built to Spill into the realm of Important Indie Rock Bands. That record, along with follow-up Keep It Like a Secret, established Martsch as the genre’s only active guitar god, the one guy besides J Mascis who could trill into a wah solo and actually get the tight pants shaking. The centerpiece of 2000’s Live is a twenty-minute version of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” that more-often-than-not surpasses the original in its spacy noodling. In 2006, the group released You in Reverse, which, while lacking the slick melodies that so define Perfect and Secret, shows that Martsch’s ability to experiment with song structure without losing pop sensibility has only grown in the ten years his band has been on Warner Brothers.

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