Built To Spill

Time for a quick quiz: The Rolling Stones are to classic rock what Built To Spill is to what? And the answer is . . . indie rock! Whether or not you filled in the blank correctly, everyone in the audience gets a prize pack of favorites pruned from the sturdy Built To Spill catalog. Songs like the gnarled, mid-tempo nugget "Strange," and the stargazing slide-guitar ballad "You Were Right." Can't forget the churning, mad dash of "Conventional Wisdom," either.

Ah, the love song: so familiar, so necessary, yet so trite at times — unless, that is, it's being rewritten and reworked with the capable, creative hands of someone like Doug Martsch, the patriarch of Built To Spill. These Next Steps defy the musical and lyrical clichés of indie rock, traversing the foreign territories of C&W ("Happiness"), campfire pop ("The Weather"), and stretchy guitar jams from the school of Neil Young ("I Would Hurt a Fly").

Now we're talking! As if the previous tracks weren't evidence enough of Built To Spill's legacy among college radio audiences, jam band festivals, and beyond, we now offer the following cleanup cuts. The Halo Benders is a quirky pop pairing of Doug Martsch and fellow Northwestern fixture Calvin Johnson (of Beat Happening); Treepeople is a noisier, filthier precursor to the Built To Spill era; and tracks like "Trimmed and Burning" and "Wherever You Go" set record store speakers ablaze with Martsch's incendiary riffs.

The name Doug Martsch may not immediately spring to mind when talk turns to "guitar gods," but try telling that to the legion of Built To Spill fans that helped make the band an indie-rock institution in the '90s. As important to the scene's development as Modest Mouse, Pavement, Superchunk, and Sebadoh, Built To Spill has got it all: off-kilter melodies for the picky college crowd, open-ended structures for those who prefer songs that sound like mazes, and sharp, idiosyncratic lyrics just waiting to be quoted by record store clerks.