Built to Spill
Ultimate Alternative Wavers

Among the brightest stars in the firmament of 90's indie(pendent) music, there is undoubtedly Doug Martsch who, after being part of the Treepeople of Seattle during the grunge-era—a band mimicking giants like the late Replacements of Paul Westerberg without ever truly finding its own definitive identity—wrote with Built to Spill, formed in his native Boise (Idaho), some of the most personal and authentic pages of the decade. A sort of contemplative and spiritual counterpart to his guardian figure, J Mascis, Doug Martsch adopted his neurotic guitar work, though with relaxed nerves. Those terrible maelstroms of feedback, distortions, and dissonances could now freely float in labyrinthine psychedelic suites or expand into interminable jams, following the precepts of ancient masters of deconstruction (Captain Beefheart, his favorite artist; Syd Barrett; Velvet Underground). It is not onanism, in the case of Built to Spill, to speak of post-psychedelia.

"Ultimate Alternative Wavers" (C/Z Records, 1993), their debut, is a great manifesto of indecision. Doug Martsch's style, still budding, is still teetering between Sonic Youth-rooted atonal guitar work ("The First Song") and J Mascis-style major crescendos ("Built to Spill"), although the void placed between this doubt is amply filled by the two unpredictable jams of "Shameful Dread" and "Built Too Long", more reminiscent of the ramshackle, wild model of early Flaming Lips than the learned and ornately adorned suites they would master in later albums. At times, it seems that the songs of this debut are almost imbued with a rush to showcase every facet of their spectrum—from the folk nursery rhyme of "Lie for a Lie" to the introspective atmosphere of "Get a Life", which then unfolds into the static psychedelia of "Hazy", vaguely bucolic in flavor, yet never reaching an effective focus of the latter. Perhaps due to this tendency for dispersion, it is a somewhat underrated debut but already capable of showcasing all the hallmarks of their originality, as well as containing their first classic. "Nowhere Nothin' Fuckup" indeed is a pure Neil Young-style electric ballad, with lyrics semi-stolen from that "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" written by Lou Reed back in 1970, which quickly becomes their showpiece in live performances and generational anthem for all the loner/loser in America.

If, later on, Built to Spill would reach their formal peaks in the undisputed masterpiece of "Perfect From Now On", here instead lies the proverbial expressive urgency of every debut. Doug Martsch, still undecided between acoustic and distorted, between neurosis and contemplation, between noise and quiet, crosses here the embryonic stage of his subsequent supernova, capable of merging all these factors into a single amalgam. And we, more as lovers of indie-rock than of astronomical geography, cannot afford not to follow a phenomenon of this caliber from its beginning to its end. In short, this "Ultimate Alternative Wavers" is yet another must-have for all those who would tattoo that "Just gimme indie rock!" on their bicep.