★★★★★
Learning to love an essential album is not always a simple task. Upon first listening to Built to Spill's Perfect from Now On, an eight-song psychedelic rock romp which clocks in at 54 minutes, and whose pop structures undergo cathartic transformations seemingly out of nowhere, I immediately was impressed by the album's bombastic moments, but did not feel any particular urge to spin it again...
- www.punknews.org
2012-02-09
★★★★★
For die-hard Built to Spill fans, it seems almost an eternity since the band's last full-length, 2001's "Ancient Melodies from the Future," was released. And in the world of accelerated pop-culture, in some ways, an eternity it has been. The band's sixth proper LP--and its fourth for Warner Bros.--marks a new direction. Gone is longtime producer Phil Ek, and in his place stands a band pushing forward in both sound and texture...
- www.soundspike.com
2010-12-07
★★★★★
The return of BTS, arguably the pre-eminent collaborative jam act of our time, has yielded us You in Reverse, and for this delicious bounty we should be thankful indeed. From the opening salvo (Goin' Against Your Mind) onward, this is a well-constructed group of psychedelic, intense-yet-easygoing (paradox, anyone?) jams, including the exotic, trippy Mess With Time and the crazy daydream vibe of Just a Habit...
- www.hour.ca
2010-11-23
★★★★★
In this day in age of trends, fads, and hype genres/bands, it's good to see a group like Built to Spill come along with their own brand of heady and earthy guitar rock on their sixth effort. Now with new guitarist Jim Roth in tow, Built to Spill have hit the ground running after a five year dry spell and exhibiting the stamina of which they have retained for going over thirteen years now since their first album...
- www.gigwise.com
2010-11-09
★★★★★
While the early 1990s saw the American music scene awash with plaid shirts and greasy hair, the real revolutions were taking place in the scattered corners of its underground. One of those was in the Idaho city of Boise, which although not a million miles away from the more celebrated home of grunge Seattle, managed to throw up an outfit just as influential, if not in a commercial sense then certainly by way of the legacy they've spawned...
- www.gigwise.com
2010-11-09
★★★★★
"There Is No Enemy" is the latest album from Influential U.S indie veterans Built To Spill. It took founder Doug Martsch three years to write, re-write, tweak, undo, edit, repeat, repeat, repeat... Oh, and did I mention taking out all the guitar parts, digitally un-mixing them and replacing them with the original takes because they had a better feel? Three years of day-long studio binges and manic perfectionism like this and you'd expect fucking War Of The Worlds, right...
- hangout.altsounds.com
2010-11-02
★★★★★
Live albums always offer a precarious task for musicians. If a band merely fills the studio molds with too-perfect clarity, fans want for the lack of stage improv. If the band jams on the closing riff for six minutes, the fans yawn. So what's the perfect balance of fiddling and play-by-numbers? If you've ever exclaimed, "Man, the guitarist adds a little vibrato to the one note in the hook! And the riff has this little extra stutter," ask yourself why this really matters...
- pitchfork.com
2010-09-11
★★★★★
It had seemed as if the story of Built to Spill was already more or less written: Indie pop band forgoes simple, summery perfection of early work to craft epic, melodic guitar-rock. From 1996's Perfect From Now On through 2001's Ancient Melodies of the Future, Built to Spill records served as a reliable platform for Doug Martsch's plaintive and layered songwriting, brought to life by a band whose talent and proficiency at times seemed boundless...
- pitchfork.com
2010-09-11
★★★★★
I hate talking about press kits, but I'm gonna drop the rule this time around. Press kits, for the uninitiated, are like a sales pitch. You get a letter from some yahoo behind a desk who has this neat band they want you to check out. To get you to do that, they also include various write-ups and reviews for a previous work or, in the case of a new band, loads of "Next Big Thing" accolades. Usually, a press kit is a dozen pages or less...
- pitchfork.com
2010-09-11
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