Built to Spill, There is No Enemy (2009, Warner Bros.)
Purchase this album (Amazon)

If Doug Martsch sang like Dave Grohl, Rivers Cuomo, or even Thom Yorke, Built to Spill would be huge, arena-packin’ gunslingers and rich bastards, to boot. In a parallel universe, Martsch might have killed Chris Martin in some combination one-on-one basketball game-cum-minor celebrity death match, ridding us of Coldplay and winning the hand of Gwyneth Paltrow, only to discard her upon hearing her Oprah-fied tips on beauty and spiritual wellness. Built to Spill might’ve then invaded some minor republic like Kalmykia, slaying its meager armed forces with nothing but the brute volume of their amplification and building a towering monument to the band’s undisputed leader, made entirely of reconstituted Fender and Gibson products and melted-down copies of Coldplay’s X&Y. The new nation’s national anthem would have been Neil Young’s “Love and Only Love”—a ten-minute distorted guitar manifesto, the kind King Doug loves and would insist upon being added to state radio playlists.

The Idaho-born Martsch, in other words, is a fucking god, but his reedy, nasally singing voice—a hallmark of every Built to Spill album—is the very thing that keeps his band from being the kind of international proggy juggernaut those cutie-pies in Muse currently are. Things are not bound to change with There Is No Enemy, good as it is, as Martsch’s elastic whine once again blends into the overall sound of the band, becoming, in effect, another instrumental layer you either grasp or you don’t. Even without many immediately discernible lyrics, though, the album’s songs still satisfy, displaying the full and mighty power of Built to Spill in all its parallel universe-shakin’ glory. (more…)