There’s a mustiness to the term “classic rock” that makes it seem like a slur. It’s the air of overfamiliarity, of overstayed welcome, of predictability, of canon that we had no say in being forced upon us. This, at least in part, is what made even the embarrassing aftereffects of the culture and business of rock music in the ’90s so thrilling—that feeling of storming the gates even if no one was quite sure what to do once inside.
But there’s also something aspirational about being labeled “classic rock”—about wanting to make something that could both iconically represent a specific time and become unstuck from it. This feels like the way to think about Built to Spill’s Perfect From Now On, which began its life being compared to avatars of the former but gets to spend eternity as an exemplar of the latter.
There’s Nothing Wrong With Love the second album Doug Martsch had made with a revolving cast of bandmates under the name Built to Spill, was of its time. Released in 1994, it’s an unassuming, lovely slab of lo-fi fuzz-pop about growing up, and not growing up, in Idaho, with picaresque lyrics about playing seven-up with grade-school crushes, driving nowhere in particular, loneliness, and the childlike wonder of staring up at the stars. Then he followed it up with an album-length response from the galaxy’s point of view.
In 1997, at the peak of the underground’s widespread gentrification, there wasn’t an album that blended outsize ambition with characteristically indie aw-shucks modesty like Perfect From Now On—a sprawling, seeds-in-the-gatefold opus happily bankrolled and distributed by one of the biggest media conglomerates on earth. Two years after its release, Doug Martsch described the album to the AV Club as “kind of big and epic, but also kind of crappy and personal,” which is about as clear a distillation of the music industry’s post-grunge boom years’ identity crisis ever stated. If the mid-’90s meant mastering the fine art of trying to do big things while seeming small, Perfect From Now On may be its defining artifact.
It is positively quaint, now, to think back on the melodrama of indie bands signing to major labels and the degree to which this drove the central narrative for an entire era of music. One of the most important and fruitful periods in contemporary pop cultural history was dominated by the question of whether or not to take corporate money to make art. This period’s most important artists were often defined by their abilities to resist; their subsequent work was seen through the filter of how that decision changed them, of what was sacrificed in the name of expanding an audience, of whether something means more if it’s consumed less.
When Built to Spill signed to Warner Bros., it didn’t feel shocking, nor was the decision in opposition to the band’s carefully cultivated outsider image; they didn’t have one. Martsch had a young son to take care of, there’s nothing wrong with practicality. There was little hand-wringing as to whether “Car” would start soundtracking Volkswagen commercials or whether Martsch would abandon the fierce principles he’d shaped over a few years of lo-fi scrappiness to score a gig at the Peach Pit. But: If the label wanted to give him more money than he’d ever needed to make an album, he was going to use more money than he’d ever needed to make an album.
While the songs on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love were straightforward and concise, the new ones were expansive and twisty, layers of guitars doing things that often didn’t sound like things guitars do. They had all the markings of dramatically increased scope, even if that was a goal their creator wasn’t necessarily interested in telegraphing.
What this all amounted to was a guarantee that some mathematically measurable number of people were actually going to hear this music and judge it on its merits, stripped from the comfort of indie-clique shorthand. “It was definitely the first time I thought there was going to be an audience for my music,” Martsch told Magnet. “This was the first time I was like, ‘Whoa, people are actually going to listen to this, and it’s going to be reviewed.’ Up until then, everything was kind of like free and fun.”
One explanation for Perfect From Now On’s enduring appeal is the fact that it was made three different times. Produced again by Phil Ek, making his own major-label debut at 24, the first sessions felt lackluster, so Martsch scrapped them. They started over with Martsch’s high school bandmate Brett Nelson on bass and the Spinanes’ Scott Plouf on drums, where they’d remain for 17 years. Confusingly, Brett Netson of Boise’s Caustic Resin, played guitar. Those tapes were ruined after being left in Ek’s pickup truck. So the third time—with that much more preparation and rehearsal—was the charm, but at the expense of Martsch’s patience. When it came time to tour behind the album, Martsch could barely bring himself to play any of the songs that were on it.
The meticulousness, whatever it took to get there, shows. The album consists of eight songs in 54 minutes, although that’s a little deceiving—“Stop the Show” has no fewer than four different songs packed into its six and a half minutes. The shortest is “Made Up Dreams” at a svelte 4:52, and the climax, “Untrustable / Part 2 (About Someone Else)”—there is no Part 1—is just shy of nine minutes. Big songs about big moods.
“Randy Described Eternity” begins the album with a metal sphere 10 times the size of Jupiter that floats a few yards past the earth every thousand years and a dude named Randy, but this is as close as the album comes 2112’s orbit. Nothing is a difficult listen or a test; even the most intricate songs feel like long brisk walks rather than math problems. There are guitar solos—are there are ever guitar solos—but they don’t feel wanky, they don’t feel like self-indulgent refutations of punk’s economy, they just feel like a guy who knows how to play guitar real good.
“Velvet Waltz” is as advertised, “Kicked It in the Sun” is rainy-day indoor space-rock. It’s a concept album about not really having any idea what’s going on. The album’s most memorable lyric is the refrain of “Untrustable”: “God is whoever you’re performing for.” It’s a marvel of a rallying cry about art and intimacy the myth of indie-rock ambivalence and defining for yourself what success means and Martsch sings it like a shrug.
Martsch himself resisted the low-hanging comparison to FM staples like Neil Young (although his trademark adenoidal vocals and this 21-minute cover of “Cortez the Killer” probably didn’t help). He saw his nascent guitar heroism and gravitation towards more complex arrangements as owing to contemporaries like Butthole Surfers and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Dinosaur Jr. It was classic rock for kids who didn’t know whether it was cool to like classic rock but would never admit to being self-conscious enough to question whether it was cool to like classic rock.
The total lack of mythology or image surrounding the band has become Perfect From Now On’s greatest asset. The music is just the music, there’s no baggage that’s accrued with time that changes its perception, nobody disappointed anybody or died or joined the Smashing Pumpkins. Your enjoyment suffers not one bit from not knowing what Doug Martsch looks like. The record doesn’t sound like 1997 or 1967; it and exists to get lost in, to make you want to carve out some time to get lost. There are new things to find in every listen, which isn’t that different from the impulse to sync up The Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz, just to see.
Perfect From Now On didn’t mark some dramatic fulcrum in the band’s trajectory—the album sold well enough to begin a relationship with Warner Bros. that, remarkably, only wound down last year. Its follow-up, 1999’s Keep It Like a Secret, was a return to more compact songwriting and subsequent albums have generally followed suit, to surprisingly little diminishing returns. But none of them feel as of a piece as Perfect. Martsch, Plouf, and Nelson played the album in its entirety for shows in 2008; it feels right to think of this as a 10th-anniversary celebration that they spaced on and wound up getting to a year late.
Nor was it even 1997’s most dramatic example of a band leveling up and delivering a career-redefining existential masterpiece; OK Computer could be Perfect From Now On’s evil twin (or maybe Perfect is OK’s stoner cousin). Martsch seems fine with not having any answers and revels in the comfort of being lost. In “Velvet Waltz,” a song about a “world that’s not so bad,” he sings, “You better just enjoy the luxury of sympathy if that’s a luxury you have,” and it’s the best advice no one ever gave to Thom Yorke. Both albums hit similar nerves about the significance of cohesive album-length Big Statements, whether that was a conscious throwback or just a reminder that the present wasn’t such a convulsive change after all.
On a recent Thursday night in Brooklyn, Built to Spill—now comprised of Martsch, Steve Gere on drums, and Jason Albertini on bass, the same lineup BTS has had since 2015’s Untethered Moon—played to about 250 people between stops on a co-headlining tour with Afghan Whigs. Martsch seemed to only have brought one guitar with him, so changing a broken string or between-song tuning became exercises in long, stubborn, almost performatively awkward silences. The instinct to say something seemed so obvious that to just not somehow felt like a political decision, a meta-commentary on what it means to lead a band and manage the dynamic between performer and whoever you’re performing for. On this night, God looked like a bunch of folks wearing winter coats indoors and stifling the urge to shout requests while making fleeting “You think this is a little weird, too, right?” eye contact with one another. And our subject, our disciple, was an unbothered guy who may have packed too light for a long trip.
