Word: guitar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Built to Spill legend starts back in the early '90s in beautiful and scenic Boise, Idaho. Somewhere between potato farms and militia members, Boise managed to churn out Doug Martsch, leader and resident guitar god of Built to Spill. First came Ultimate Alternative Wavers, a perplexing title for a perplexing album. A dense and jagged slice of paranoid pop, the album only hinted at the musical mazes that were yet to pour out of Martsch's head...
...When Martsch announced he had finished Built to Spill's sophomore album, everyone expected the long, languished and sometime lost guitar heroics that had dominated the first release. Once again, more hype for the band to prove wrong. With There's Nothing Wrong with Love, Martsch set his sights at pure pop bliss captured in the moments of everyday life...
...veers from one violently brilliant extreme to another. Some shows tumble into unbelievable 30-minute long jams on b-sides of singles released five years ago. Others are made up of drop-dead perfect sonic recreations of the album, filled out with the intensity of Martsch flailing at his guitar before your eyes. Then again, Martsch has probably completely rewritten the Built to Spill playbook by now, just to keep us critics on our toes. The only way to find out for sure? Check it out yourself...
...tune guitar that's missing a string, and sometimes, late at night when my roommates have closed their doors and gone to sleep, I take it out of its case and prop it on my knee. That's when I write my 2 a.m. ballads, my mostly wordless, atonal compositions that require fewer than three chords. To call them "songs" would probably be too generous. They have no sharp beginning, and I stop whenever my fingers start to hurt or I get too sleepy. If you walk down Dewolfe Street late at night, listen carefully for an off-key strumming...
...play my out-of-tune guitar not for the glory or the girls, but because it makes me feel good. I find that strumming a few chords is like slipping into a hot bath after a hard day of work. When I play my obscene ditties about Core classes or bodily functions, I can feel the tension seeping from my muscles. There's a real satisfaction in doing something on your own time, without the expectation that anyone else will find it interesting or impressive...