This is a weird one. A few weeks ago, with zero advance notice or context, Built to Spill's Brett Nelson released seven of his band's songs re-imagined as synth-pop tunes, scrambled their names into anagrams ("Goin' Against Your Mind" = "I Dim Our Angst In Agony") and gave the project the dry, Alan-Lomax-sounding title, The Electronic Anthology Project. Why did he do this? Well, after spending some time with the results, it's still hard to say: it's either an extension of the goofy enthusiasm that made him think reggae Built to Spill might be a really awesome idea or a product of his rarely displayed jokey side, the one that made the fake "preview" of his upcoming album at the end of There's Nothing Wrong With Love ("Look for the record with ME on the cover!!") Either way, it makes for pretty inessential listening.
Passing this judgment feels odd, as the project was clearly meant as a goof. The studiously blank yellow cover, the idiosyncratic song selection, and the low profile all warn against taking The Electronic Anthology Project seriously. And yet, the idea of synth-pop Built to Spill is exciting enough to be a little let down by this result. Both sides of the band's sound-- the There's Nothing Wrong With Love lo-fi phase and the liquid, majestic haze of their later years-- are rich with sonic possibilities. BtS leader Doug Martsch joined Nelson on the project, re-recorded some vocals, and helped mix the album; Martsch's guitar tone has always blended nicely with keyboards and synthesizers, and his shy, frail tenor is ideally suited, at least in theory, to synth-pop. However, very little of any of these opportunities made it onto The Electronic Anthology Project. As you might say of a half-baked high-concept summer blockbuster, this one never really got past the pitch stage.
The synths throughout are generally stuck on a single preset, and it appears to be the same used for the Flash Man stage of Mega Man II. This tinny, chip-tune approach suits some BTS songs better than others. On "I Dim Our Angst in Agony", "Goin' Against Your Mind"'s gorgeous tangle of guitars is cruelly reduced to a pair of wormy, dueling sine waves. "Get a Life", a deep cut off of BTS debut, Ultimate Alternative Wavers, meanwhile, sounds improbably great reinvented as a piece of cheesy synth-rock, its guitar line suddenly a dead ringer for Europe's "The Final Countdown". The good moments almost make you wish Nelson and Martsch had taken this concept more seriously. "What If Your Dull" turns "I Would Hurt a Fly" into drowsy, menacing trip-hop, while "At the Where" takes the disarming little love song "The Weather" and makes it sound like a moonlit distant cousin to Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time". If this were a side project and not a throwaway joke, it could be a great little album.
