2008 Woodie Awards
Built to Spill and The Flaming Lips duke it out
By: Geoffrey Steuven
Issue date: 4/28/06 Section: The Arts
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Built to Spill gained all sorts of rock critic cred back in 1999 with Keep It Like a Secret, the same year that The Flaming Lips broke out of their unfortunate one-hit wonder status (remember “She Don't Use Jelly”?) with the formalist masterpiece The Soft Bulletin. In the intervening years, The Lips have continued to wow American critics with meditations on the inevitability of death and the necessity of love and a cartoonish stage image, while Built to Spill have kept a low profile and a reputation for boring-ness that is simply a cover for a truly exciting and classic rock `n' roll band.
Now both bands are back with early April releases, and the consensus seems to be that everything is different even while nothing has changed. On You in Reverse, it is said that Built to Spill have finally let their inhibitions go and released the great rock album they always had in them. But they had few musical inhibitions to begin with, and Keep It Like a Secret was a damn-near-perfect rock album seven years before this one.
And on At War With the Mystics, The Flaming Lips have constructed another cycle of songs about love and death, this time without a specific conceptual link and peppered with decidedly political undertones. The Mystics referred to in the title could either be radical Islamic terrorists or the born-again leader of the free world, depending on your mood.
You In Reverse is an album in the grand tradition of Television and Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth, bands that let their guitars do most of the talking. Leader Doug Martsch's plaintive moan is largely absent from the proceedings, serving often merely as punctuation between the instrumental onslaughts.
In terms of sound, Built to Spill may be descendents of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and their brethren, but there is a difference. Like Sleater-Kinney with last year's glorious The Woods, Built to Spill makes hard rock more palatable by giving it an indie-rock/post-punk context, thereby removing the sort of elitism associated with heavy metal and prog-rock that always kept an invisible barrier between musician and fan. Even the cover art recalls the 80s DIY aesthetic, a simplistic and gaudily pleasing stilllife that suggests a band either short on cash or doing a favor for its starving-artist friend.
Now both bands are back with early April releases, and the consensus seems to be that everything is different even while nothing has changed. On You in Reverse, it is said that Built to Spill have finally let their inhibitions go and released the great rock album they always had in them. But they had few musical inhibitions to begin with, and Keep It Like a Secret was a damn-near-perfect rock album seven years before this one.
And on At War With the Mystics, The Flaming Lips have constructed another cycle of songs about love and death, this time without a specific conceptual link and peppered with decidedly political undertones. The Mystics referred to in the title could either be radical Islamic terrorists or the born-again leader of the free world, depending on your mood.
You In Reverse is an album in the grand tradition of Television and Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth, bands that let their guitars do most of the talking. Leader Doug Martsch's plaintive moan is largely absent from the proceedings, serving often merely as punctuation between the instrumental onslaughts.
In terms of sound, Built to Spill may be descendents of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and their brethren, but there is a difference. Like Sleater-Kinney with last year's glorious The Woods, Built to Spill makes hard rock more palatable by giving it an indie-rock/post-punk context, thereby removing the sort of elitism associated with heavy metal and prog-rock that always kept an invisible barrier between musician and fan. Even the cover art recalls the 80s DIY aesthetic, a simplistic and gaudily pleasing stilllife that suggests a band either short on cash or doing a favor for its starving-artist friend.
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