Built To Spill
Ancient Melodies Of The Future

THE REVIEW

Perhaps a more fitting title for an album has never been conceived... good old Martsch...

These are truly ancient melodies of the future, ancient melodies infused with that sense of melancholy present in almost all the songs of the three from Boise. (In this album, they were three...). Of the future, however. Because this album is difficult, precisely because it is ancient and future, acoustic and electric, delicate and rough. Divided into two but only one... A contradiction in song terms.

"Strange" starts and we are in the future, intertwining guitars, decisive drums, and keyboard embroidering a text about daily alienation (work, relationships, interpret as you will...) It's the single. Past and the usual melancholy in the beautiful "The Host", emotional, disorienting, narcotic. "Happiness", dobro guitar and a scent of American folklore, with a pinch of electric Neil Young. "Alarmed" and "You Are". Two slow, touching, pure, unsettling songs. Future and hence "In Your Mind", "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" that reminds me of Camper Van Beethoven, live, at the smallest country fair. Almost a divertissement...

This "Ancient Melodies" is not an immediate album, as the previous "Keep It Like A Secret" might be. It's from 2001 but has also been released in 2011, and even in 1911. It's timeless. Not because it’s a classic, but because it is temporally unplaceable.

I understand why it took five years to release another masterpiece. For forty minutes, there are no more minutes.